Thoughts on why current machine learning alone cannot fully automate comprehensive trademark clearance searching. A number of people and firms have applied machine learning techniques to the task of automating word mark clearance searching. And others, including the global head of R&D at one of the leading law firms, have suggested that it’s a valuable R&D path to try now. I’m not so sure that’s so.  We’ve tested search tools that are described as machine learning-driven and compared the results to those from our own search tool which uses a human-designed model of similarity  (US patent here  https://patents.google.com/patent/US20080228485A1/en  ) All are competent and useful for short text strings of a couple of words, particularly where both words are distinctive. However, the machine learning search tools are much less effective when one of the search strings is 3 or 4 or more words and distinctive terms are mixed in with descriptive words. If as a...