Any serious company should create and protect its own trademarks. Creation process is done by internal employees or with external design agency. So far so good.
But then there's registration process. Usually a patent and trademark national office won't check if your new suggested trademark looks too similar to already registered trademarks (or they do - if you pay them!). They just care if your submission is correct e.g. all forms included. So one is generally responsible for checking all existing registered trademarks in (national) database.
This is cumbersome. Imagine having to check thousands of trademarks (more than 1.000.000 in USPTO database [1], PDF, 5.57 MB, see page 23)! So the solution must be some kind of image search where we could compare our image - either usual image, hand drawn or typed characters - with those in database.
We are preparing such solution for our national (Slovenian) database consisting of over 16.000 images (they are in two sizes which can also mean slightly different version so there are more than 32.000 images - there are also registered trademarks without images). Slovenian Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) has kindly permitted downloading them. As we will first demonstrate our solution to SIPO only screenshots will be provided here when we finish development. It will be possible to search and find similar images in seconds.
Conclusion is obvious. Searching similar images in trademarks database should be available to any party that wants to register its own trademark. Costs for getting sued later if similar trademark infringement is reported can be avoided without browsing all registered trademarks manually - which is itself unnecessary and unpractical process. Work smart not more.