Similar patterns mining for multivariate time series is becoming a hot topic in the area of data mining, which consists of three consecutive parts: Feature representation, similarity measure and similarity search. Most researches mainly focus on feature representation and similarity measure, which make similarity search still a tough problem in similar patterns mining. Therefore, the existing similarity measures are summarized, different methods of similarity search for multivariate time series are compared, their merits and demerits are analyzed, and the further research direction is provided.