[E-trademarks] Regex search

[Carl Oppedahl]

My best guess is the USPTO hired some private contractor to develop the 
system.  My best guess is that the contract the USPTO drafted and put 
out for bid did not include anything that remotely resembles "contractor 
shall write up user documentation that fully describes how to actually 
use the system and how the search function works".  It's hard work to 
correctly describe in words what is needed of a contractor in projects 
like this, and my guess is nobody at the USPTO did that hard work.

My best guess is that not one person who works at the private contractor 
has ever been on the user end of any system that they have ever 
developed. In particular my best guess is that nobody at the USPTO who 
administered this contract ever got any real users (e.g. people like us) 
into the process of drafting the contract or alpha testing the system or 
beta testing the system.  In particular my best guess is that nobody at 
the contractor was asked to get any real users (e.g. people like us) 
into the process of picking the indexes to construct, or defining the 
content of the fields, or designing the search engine, or designing any 
other part of the user interface.

My best guess is that the previous two paragraphs merely scratch the 
surface of all of the things that nobody at the USPTO did, but should 
have done, on this project.

On 3/15/2024 6:40 PM, Richard Schafer via E-trademarks wrote:
> The fact that we have to make guesses about how the indexes work shows how poorly the PTO has implemented and documented this system. I wonder if examining attorneys have the same poor explanation about how the indexes work. If they do, that's really bad. If they have a fuller explanation, what possible reason would the PTO have for not making that explanation public?
>
> Best regards,
> Richard A. Schafer | Schafer IP Law
> P.O. Box 230081 | Houston, TX 77223
> M: 832.283.6564 | richard at schafer-ip.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: E-trademarks <e-trademarks-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> On Behalf Of Neil R. Ormos via E-trademarks
> Sent: Friday, March 15, 2024 6:19 PM
> To: E-trademarks Mailing List <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>
> Cc: Neil R. Ormos <ormos-lists at ormos.org>
> Subject: Re: [E-trademarks] Regex search
>
> Pamela Chestek via E-trademarks wrote:
>
>> Can anyone explain to me why the first two search queries didn't give
>> me the same results as the third query? I was in expert mode.
>   
>> GS:/t\-shirt/    0
>> GS:/t[-]shirt/    0
>> GS:t-shirt    511200
> When the GS index is used with a regular expression search, the index appears to contain each of the words of the goods and services field in isolation.  Spaces and hyphens separate words, but some other punctuation does not.  Your regexps do not match because t-shirt does not appear as a single word in the index.
>
> The GS index behaves differently when used with other types of search.
>
>    <https://oppedahl-lists.com/pipermail/e-trademarks_oppedahl-lists.com/2024-January/000554.html>
>
> And the GS2 index also behaves differently.
>
> GS2:/t[-]shirt/
>
> returns 61,341 records.
>
> I know GS2 does some sort of stemming, but I haven't been able to synthesize a complete explanation.  If someone has GS2 figured it out, or knows of a document that describes its behavior, I hope they will explain.
>
>
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