[E-trademarks] Help on quick, down, and dirty learning the new advanced search features

[Neil R. Ormos]

Richard Schafer wrote:

> So apparently, the GS3 search only finds records
> where the IC is the primary class and not where
> the US class is the primary class.

I believe that whatever is the primary class--i.e., whether that is the International Class or the US class--is prepended to the GS3 index.

> And I'm confused. Why does the same search using
> GS or GS2 not find the 72457899 record,
> regardless of whether 009 or 021 is specified in
> the search? Both of them are supposed to contain
> the IC and the U.S. class. Is the difference
> that GS3 prepends the primary class to the goods
> and services text, while
> GS and GS2 include the
> IC and U.S. class in the search, but not as part
> of the same string as the goods and services?

I don't think that's the answer.  This search for the first four tokens in the Goods and Services does find 72457899:

  GS2:"us 021 integrated circuit" AND LD:true AND SN:72*

which suggests that the class is indeed prepended to the GS2 index.

(An unfortunate aspect of some modern web-based search interfaces is that (AFAIK) there's no way to browse the contents of the indices as we could, for example, using the Dialog service, via the /expand/ command, so we have to infer the index contents from what is matched.)

There is something else going on that prevents finding 72457899 using this search:

  GS2:/.*021.*integrated.*circuit.*/ AND LD:true AND SN:72*

I don't know why, but there appears to be an incompatibility between the GS and GS2 indices and the regular expression (regexp) search feature such that the regexp search does not match multiple words, while the quotation search does.  I'm not sure if this is a bug or intended behavior, but it is certainly counter-intuitive.

Thus, a regexp search for /.*integrated.*circuit.*/ against the GS or GS2 indices, EVEN WITHOUT THE CLASS NUMBER, matches no records:

  GS2:/.*integrated.*circuit.*/ AND LD:true AND SN:72*

But the multiple-word search, in quoted, non-regexp form:

  GS:"integrated circuits" AND LD:true AND SN:72*

matches 16 records, and this search:

  GS2:"integrated circuits" AND LD:true AND SN:72*

matches 17 records, the difference presumably due to stemming in GS2.