19 ms·

Shirt Without Stripes

• raindropm 6y ago
  Apparently, this kinda works in Thai language too(and I think other language also) The search keyword is "เสื้อไม่มีแถบ" which is literally translated as 'Shirt without stripes'. It's common words to speak, unlike 'without' in English. The result, of course, show shirt with some kind of stripe, albeit not prominent like the English one.
• antman 6y ago
  A good display of the current state of search engines.
  • leephillips 6y ago
    The results are exactly what I would expect and hope to get.
    • enumjorge 6y ago
      When you search for “shirt without stripes” you expect and hope to get shirts and t-shirts with stripes?
      • leephillips 6y ago
        Yes. I expect to get results that contain the keywords "shirt", "stripes", and "without", but perhaps with the last term ignored. Why, what would you expect? Would you search for "shirts that don't have stripes"? Or "shirts lacking stripes"?
        • coldtea 6y ago
          >Why, what would you expect? I'd expect to see some of the much touted "search intelligence", NLP, term inference, vector term analysis, and AI in action...
          • leephillips 6y ago
            It sounds like you expect the search engines to understand natural language, because your expectations are influenced by what is "touted". Do you think that's a realistic expectation?
          • Ugohcet 6y ago
            Google started doing that with its regular search queries several years ago. There are thousands of complains on HN about how it's almost impossible now to find anything without "quoting" "every" "word" "of" "your" "query".
            • saagarjha 6y ago
              If it's going to do that, it should do it right. If not, then I think it's fair to criticize it for not getting the search query correct.
        • jcims 6y ago
          This is the only interface you really get into the amazon catalog. What if you really are looking for shirts that don't have stripes? How would you formulate the query?
          • leephillips 6y ago
            Like Google, Amazon is supposed to support the - operator, but, also like Google, it's not clear whether it does anything at the moment. As others here have suggested, maybe "solid shirts"?
          • sonofgod 6y ago
            My first assumption is [shirts -stripes] Of the first ten hits: Amazon: 7/10 aren't shirts (but all are stripeless) Google: All shirts, one is checked Bing: All shirts, all contain stripes in description. Not exactly glowing for Amazon, clearly unsupported by Bing.
      • Ugohcet 6y ago
        I would prefer results containing words "shirt", "stripes" and "without". I don't want search engines to freely interpret my query and guess what I probably wanted to see while burying exact results in hundreds of pages of useless garbage.
        • throwaway55554 6y ago
          > and guess what I probably wanted How is interpreting "shirts without stripes" as "I wish to see shirts that don't have any stripes" guessing? I would venture to say that most people (meaning your use case is in the minority) who type "shirts without stripes" want to see results showing shirts without stripes not results "containing words "shirt", "stripes" and "without". I think what is happening here is that you know how search engines work and so you are conditioned to expect them to do what they're doing.
          • leephillips 6y ago
            «How is interpreting "shirts without stripes" as "I wish to see shirts that don't have any stripes" guessing?"» Because I was looking for pages about the band called "Shirts without Stripes". Because I wanted pages with shirts that have stripes but where the page featured the word "without", because their shirts are without something else. Because I want to see striped shirts from the company called "Without". I don't want the machine to guess what I mean. It can never know.
        • leephillips 6y ago
          Exactly. Those who want the search engine to "understand" what they are asking for when they use words like "without" may not have thought through the unintended consequences. For there is no combination of search terms that might not be interpreted in a variety of ways that the searcher never imagined, because of the ambiguity of natural language. Better to learn and use search operators, and the strategies of careful choice of keywords.
        • enumjorge 6y ago
          I think it depends on the application. If I’m searching for products in a store I do want “shirts without stripes” to give me shirts without stripes. I have a hard time thinking of a case when including results with the word “without” would be useful when it comes to online shopping. When I’m looking up information, like an article, especially technical information, then yes I want the search engine to do as little interpreting as possible. That’s because any interpretation rules it uses won’t always be relevant so I’d rather have more control. But for Amazon? I don’t see how someone can see the average user typing “shirts without stripes” and getting almost nothing but shirts with stripes, and going “yup, works as expected”.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • Kiro 6y ago
        On one hand you complain about Google assuming too much, on the other you want more interpretation. You can't have both.
  • blondin 6y ago
    the icab link from yesterday showed a screenshot of amazon when their categories listings were still meaningful and helpful. nowadays, it's just a pain. i recently looked for dough scrapers. i wanted to see what's selling best and what's most rated. they are everywhere. in dessert & decoration, in utensils, in bakeware, and many other categories. i mean i get it... it's not just search that's hard. categorization is also an issue here.
  • nmstoker 6y ago
    Although search within apps can be even worse. I was looking through Google Movies the other day for the film 2001 and instead it swamps the results with those from the year 2001 - one could argue that there are lots of people who are massively keen to buy films based on the year of production, but I suspect it's better to satisfy those looking for years in the title first and then after that brief interruption list the year based results, rather than the other way around. Similarly looking for "The Book of Why" on Audible is dismal: even when it's in quotes it isn't until the 42 result that the exact match shows up, with a load of useless not-obviously connected results turning up first. Both these failures interest me as they have a tangible financial implication (I clearly had money to spend) and yet they remain unfixed.
    • noworriesnate 6y ago
      I realize the obvious fix for the Audible problem is to interpret double quotes as "only search for this phrase," but I wonder if an alternative solution would be do TFIDF for combinations of wordsm, not just individual words. For example, the search crawler could watch for the phrase "the book", "the book of", "the book of why", "book of", "book of why", and "of why", and weight the search results accordingly.
      • nmstoker 6y ago
        Yes, that would be a better user experience as: 1. not everyone will think to use quotes 2. it would probably be more resilient to minor user errors too (eg if it had been misused misheard as The Book of Way you'd still have a fair chance of it returning the desired result fairly high in the list)
• java-man 6y ago
  Bag of words does not work.
• jlmcguire 6y ago
  without must be a tough one? It does seem that bing is the worst at figuring this out from the pictures.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    None of them make an attempt at filtering this. While I found it amusing because they advertise with AI magic in other areas, those search engines all advertise to be keyword searches and one of them being "the worst" means it's either random (since none of them are trying) or they are the best (since it matches the stripes keyword). To be honest I wish they actually were keyword searches and that the machine doesn't try to be smarter than you. Many times when I carefully specify which keywords must appear on the page, it'll ignore parts of the query or add unrelated synonyms. Usually one can work around it with operators but it's tedious and doesn't work reliably.
• alanbernstein 6y ago
  Or you can do this: https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-stripes https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-stripes
  • staz 6y ago
    doesn't works
  • phalangion 6y ago
    Still includes some shirts with stripes, since the search is now just for shirts that don't explicitly mention stripes.
    • leephillips 6y ago
      That's not what the - operator is supposed to do. It's supposed to suppress pages containing the keyword after the -.
      • 1f60c 6y ago
        And parent is saying it isn't working. (It doesn't work for me either.)
        • leephillips 6y ago
          That's why I said "supposed" to do. I'm not sure if it's working at the moment.
  • flixic 6y ago
    You can also do "plain shirt", but the repo is making a message about the smartness of our search engines.
  • sulam 6y ago
    The '-' operator stopped working for me with Google a while back. Not sure why, it's fairly frustrating.
• slaymaker1907 6y ago
  I think that this is actually really encouraging in showing that we still have a ways to go in improving search engines. A lot of people treat search engines as a solved problem, at least for non-question answering aspects.
  • hrktb 6y ago
    I am amazed at the amount of things people are willing to treat as "solved problem". At a point there was a TED talk explaining social networks were a solved problem now that facebook was dominant. Recycling was seen as solved problem until it wasn't etc. I wonder how many actual "sovled problems" we have.
    • scabarott 6y ago
      Reminds me of this: https://www.amazon.com/End-History-Last-Man/dp/0743284550 https://www.amazon.com/End-History-Last-Man/dp/0743284550
      • disqard 6y ago
        Thank you for that reference. It's astonishing how "experts" can construct complex frameworks for justifying their personal failure of imagination.
  • bityard 6y ago
    Google has gotten significantly _less_ useful for finding technical information over the last decade or so. It used to be the case that when searching for some tech-related item (say, how to use functions in bash), the results would take you to someone's personal website or a wiki. Ostensibly, the more people linked to it and the more people clicked on it in the results, the better it ranked for that query and similar queries. Today, entering in any tech-related query at all takes you to StackOverflow, end of story. Not only are SO answers quite often outdated (or even terrible advice in general), most of the time I'm not looking for a "here's how you do X", I'm looking for background information on a topic. Most non-tech queries I put into google are even _more_ useless as the results tend to fall into these categories: * Wikipedia (okay for _very_ general things, useless for domain-specific knowledge) * SEO-enhanced blogspam, (a.k.a. "8 Weird Ways to Earn Millions Through Gaming The System!") * Tweets on twitter (!) The dev/tech industry desperately needs a search engine that somehow prioritizes _quality_ content, not one-off answers, blogspam, and tweets.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• sparrish 6y ago
  Learn you some Google-foo. Don't say what it isn't. Say what it is. "shirt solid color"
  • oliveshell 6y ago
    That’s obviously not the point here.
  • spelunker 6y ago
    Google-Fu == working around machine learning limitations which is the point of this post.
  • thebean11 6y ago
    But that would exclude polka dots and floral patterns..?
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    > Learn you some Google-foo. That is, learn to structure your query in a way that Google understands what you're trying to say. This used to be what yuo had to do, but now that Google tries to understand the intent of what you're trying to say and advertises as such, it's clearly a hack.
• meritt 6y ago
  The point of this isn't asking how to apply boolean search operators, it's showing that the largest AI-focused companies in the world absolutely suck at NLP.
  • Justin_K 6y ago
    I'd go as far as saying "AI" is only as good as someone has taken the time to program the use case.
    • alexpapworth 6y ago
      So, it's really just a series of if statements?
      • seph-reed 6y ago
        Either that or vague network of trial and error generalizations (deep learning/gut learning).
      • joshmn 6y ago
        Don't get ahead of yourself: it's SELECT with GROUP BY.
        • Justin_K 6y ago
          Don't forget AND keyword LIKE '%searchStr%'
      • Justin_K 6y ago
        Not that but maybe someone can explain if the technology is "AI" why it still takes tens of thousands of hours to implement a project? Shouldn't we call it AI when the frameworks can be implemented with relative ease? My point is that the level of customization required to achieve AI, in my opinion, doesn't make it very intelligent.
      • fluffything 6y ago
        Yes, each of which wraps a "Not Hotdog" app. Turns out that "Not Hotdog" is quite hard already.
• noughtme 6y ago
  Probably not surprising that most people don’t know, but negative keyword search works on all these platforms: shirt -stripes
  • derekp7 6y ago
    It would be really nice if the search engines would automatically apply the "-" when it sees the work "without".
    • oliveshell 6y ago
      I’m not so sure. What about a search query for “Doctors without Borders“ or “Men Without Hats“? Surely interpreting “without“ as the negative operator would ruin those searches.
      • NullPrefix 6y ago
        Minus before word already ruins search queries for terms that start with a dash.
      • filoleg 6y ago
        IIRC if you use quotation marks in your search query, it would search for the exact match of that phrase without any search operators processed inside of it. So those scenarios you listed would still work fine. Though I somewhat agree, I don't think that an average user even knows about existence of search operators in the first place, let alone being aware of this specific one and when to use it.
      • derekp7 6y ago
        What happens when someone asks you about one of those items? You consult your memory reserves, and you find that those are proper names of specific entities. So your brain returns those entities. Now there very well be a high school band called "Shirts without Stripes", you most likely would call up plain shirts or shirts with non-striped patterns. No reason that a search engine wouldn't follow the same rules (i.e., Google must have millions of entries for Doctors without Borders and Men without Hats).
• diegorbaquero 6y ago
  This is expected, not wanted though, I would expect some semantic analysis translated into "shirt -stripes", but what you really mean is "solid color shirt". This is a tough one but surely something that can be tackled with research
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    shirt -stripes does not mean "solid color shirt", as the - operator looks for that text on the page, instead of performing a semantic "I don't want stripes".
    • SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
      And "shirt without stripes" doesn't mean solid color shirt either. Could have spots. Could be Hawaiian print. Is plaid striped?
  • leni536 6y ago
    stripes are not the only pattern besides solid color.
• CPLX 6y ago
  Related: https://www.google.com/search?q=mountains+without+women+in+a+bikini&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiygeHatPfoAhWGknIEHe8QDSkQ_AUoAXoECAwQAw&biw=1747&bih=947 https://www.google.com/search?q=mountains+without+women+in+a...
• rgovostes 6y ago
  The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their advanced AI capabilities, yet they cannot understand a very simple query that young children can.
  • oconnor663 6y ago
    Searching for "now one with stripes this time please" yielded similarly disappointing results :) Edit: "stripes" not "stripped" ugh
    • devy 6y ago
      Google's result is noticeably better though. :)
      • chipperyman573 6y ago
        What's better about it? I didn't notice anything good.
        • lonesword 6y ago
          I think he/she's being sarcastic - there's general tendency to regard google's version of "ai" as better?
      • nmstoker 6y ago
        You mean more stylish?!
        • aiven 6y ago
          He probably meant "more spicier". Second image for "now one with stripped this time please" yielded image that is linked to article about deep-fake nudes.
          • 6y ago
• cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  A few years back (in around 2012) I attended an NLP talk. The theme of this talk was how they did a study that showed prepositions and articles do have meaning. A big deal was made out of the results. I think things like this happens when people consider engineering approximations such as bag of words to be the truth over time.
  • blahedo 6y ago
    I have a PhD in NLP (which is what we often call it on the CS side, but is almost synonymous with CL="computational linguistics" on the cognitive/linguistics side of the field). I remember a talk at our annual conference, well-attended, perhaps around 2003 or so. The speaker was from one of the labs that was really leaning into "big data", which was only just becoming possible at that point, and argued persuasively that we should all just throw out our parsers and formalisms—ditch the computational linguistics side, basically—because we were on the edge of functionally infinite (unsupervised) data, and supervised and partially supervised systems would never ever be able to keep up. He presented performance numbers and how the unsupervised systems needed a lot more data to compete with the supervised systems, but that data was available, and he threw more and more and more data at the system and it got better and better. (I no longer remember the specific task he was using to illustrate his point.) There were gasps in the room and a kind of depressed acquiescence: geez, he might be right. And the pendulum indeed swung in that direction, hard, and the field has been overwhelmingly dominated by the statistical machine learning folks on the CS side of the field, while the linguists kind of quietly keep the flame alive in their corner. But I thought then, and I still think now, that it really just was another swing of the pendulum (which has gone back and forth a few times since the birth of the field in the 1960s). Perhaps it's now time again for someone to ring up the linguists and let them apply their expertise again?
• bentona 6y ago
  To me, the most interesting implication here is that this must not adversely affect Google's ad revenue. If it did, they would surely fix it. This, in turn, means that apparently we have been trained to interface with search engines such that this is not a problem. Sometimes I wonder how much my brain has changed to use search engines / how much of it is dedicated to effective googling. Makes me feel like a cyborg.
  • MattRix 6y ago
    There are lots of things Google could do improve their search and ad revenue that they haven't done yet.
  • 0x00000000 6y ago
    The other day I found that googling something like “mesothelioma -lawyer” will exclude results with “lawyer” but all the ads will still be for lawyers and contain the word “lawyer”. I guess because they leave it up to the advertiser to determine the negative match words and that seems to always have priority.
    • tantalor 6y ago
      Similar thing happens on Twitter. If you mute a phrase it will block organic content including the phrase from appearing in your timeline, except ads including the muted terms still appear in your timeline. https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-mute-options https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-m...
  • burger_moon 6y ago
    I suppose that's a base of why 'Google fu' and 'Googling skills' are such common phrases. Knowing how the machine will interpret humans is just as important to finding your results.
  • prepend 6y ago
    This is the issue I think. Amazon doesn’t care about selling a shirt without stripes, it is just as happy as selling any shirt. This assumes that AI wants truth. These three companies AI don’t necessarily want truth, they want revenue.
• ChrisArchitect 6y ago
  hm, 'without' is a tough one. You're not looking for a zebra without stripes. You're looking for a horse.
  • moron4hire 6y ago
    Not necessarily https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/09/zebra-pseudo-melanism-kenya-masai/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/09/zebra-pse...
  • myhf 6y ago
    Try searching for a "shirt without zebras"
• caust1c 6y ago
  My favorite was "What do vegetarians eat" which was broken for years: https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/855193855422943234 https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/855193855422943234
  • gumby 6y ago
    I'm significantly more concerned about what humanitarians eat, especially in today's economy.
• holdenc137 6y ago
  wake me up when I can google "Anything but crocodiles"
  • montroser 6y ago
    You're joking, but perhaps you're right. It's unnatural to search in the negative -- "solid shirt" or something like that would be more likely from a human with that actual intent. This just suggests to me that real humans haven't issued that type of search query enough for the AI to know what to do with it. Which wouldn't be so big of a problem.
• holdenc137 6y ago
  Wake me up when I can google "anything but crocodiles"
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• dvh 6y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=leap+years+in+1900s https://www.google.com/search?q=leap+years+in+1900s
• wkyle 6y ago
  Vaguely similar to a joke from Ninotchka that Zizek often uses about the difference between 'coffee without cream' and 'coffee without milk'. He usually uses it to reference the concept of negation in the Hegelian dialectic, but he's also mentioned the difficulty of computers understanding negation in the context of the coffee/cream example. The joke from Zizek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmJVsaxoQSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmJVsaxoQSw
• mabbo 6y ago
  It's not enough to say "Oh, we should add a rule that 'without' means negate the next word" because that only applies to this one situation, in this one language. Let's generalize the problem: We aren't correctly translating from English (or other spoken languages) to Computer/Logic. The state of the art in machine translation (from what I've read at least) is translating from language-A to a language-less "concept space" and then from there to language-B. Could that be done where the output language is something a search engine can use to find what you want correctly? Given that pattern, I suspect we could see much better results in cases like this.
• throw345hn 6y ago
  Only slightly related but a couple of years back I got an alexa as a gift. When you open the alexa app, they had the option to add list of todos as a reminder. The first thing I did is to say something like - Alexa, add a reminder to get milk and eggs and paper. The app literally added a single item like this - milkANDeggsANDpaper. After that I facepalmed myself and turned it off.
  • lokedhs 6y ago
    Every once in a while I try the voice recognition by trying to speak normally to it. Normally, as is saying things like: "please set a reminder for five... umm... no I mean 6 o'clock". Normal humans do this all the time, and if I can't do it speaking to it becomes incredibly frustrating to the point that I never want to do it again. I don't want to plan ahead what to say before I say it. Granted, it's been a couple of years since I last tried so maybe they're better now.
• WilliamEdward 6y ago
  querying "shirt no stripes" yields slightly better results.
• rbetts 6y ago
  This is also confusing what you search for vs. what the vendor thinks you will buy. Product catalog searches often intentionally return items outside your search parameters.
• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Weirdly, searching for 'shirt no stripes' on Google returned this web page at top of the organic results. So at some point, searching for a shirt online will involve this conversation. Even more confusing. (Although I expect my filter bubble will play a part in that)
  • shanecleveland 6y ago
    because google does understand that no and without are interchangeable. But, understandably, it does not correlate "shirt without stripes" as being the same thing as "solid-colored shirts." Why, because no one advertises or describes a solid-colored shirt as a shirt without stripes and no one searches that way. It's an irrelevant point, in my opinion.
    • lifeisstillgood 6y ago
      my point was that this very web page on HN got to top of Google search in 42 minutes or less on this search term ''' Shirt Without Stripes | Hacker Newsnews.ycombinator.com › item 42 mins ago - The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their ... '''
      • shanecleveland 6y ago
        Sorry. I meant the assumed point of the OP.
    • elsamuko 6y ago
      I was searching for a DisplayPort adapter for a Mac Mini and got MiniDisplayPort adapters for Mac :(
      • shanecleveland 6y ago
        So the better search would be "DisplayPort adapter for a Mac." As with including the word "stripes" in a search where you want to omit results with stripes, including the word "mini" is only causing unnecessary confusion. The adapter that works for a Mac Mini will also work for a Macbook, as an example.
• shanecleveland 6y ago
  I would never search for something this way. If I wanted to find a 4WD car, I wouldn't search for "cars without 2WD." Likewise, here, I would search for solid-colored shirts. And these services are limited to the content/terminology utilized by the cataloged sites/products. If I am selling a "black shirt" or a "solid black shirt," it is not google's job to catalog it as a "shirt without stripes," unless I advertise it as a "black shirt without stripes." I would use natural language to test a services' NLP ability.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • jorvi 6y ago
    But it what if you just hate shirts with stripes but do like polka dots or other patterns? You can do a fancy advanced search query with OR and EXCLUDE tricks but that is not what this post is trying to emphasize.
    • shanecleveland 6y ago
      Let's assume the point of the OP is that Google sucks at understanding this search that most people would logically understand. But let's also logically assume that most content on the web is telling the visitor what their page or product is, not what it is not. I would expect a shirt to be advertised and described as what it is: “black shirt” not “shirt without stripes.” So if a content creator does not include the exact term “without stripes” in the description of shirt, then you are relying on google to infer meaning on your behalf and the content creator. Now, this is relatively inconsequential for a shirt and perhaps not well representative, as a fashion-related searches a different than many searches. If I search for “news without coronavirus,” should I expect only articles that do not refer to coronavirus? I wouldn’t. If I was allergic to peanuts and I searched for “food without peanuts,” I would expect results from content creators and sellers of products who took care to include the term “without peanuts,” because they are advertising their product as safe for those with peanut allergies. I would not rely on google or amazon to make that determination for me. Both for google and individual sites, there are better options to further narrow results. If you don’t want to narrowly define your result to a specific pattern or color, the first search more broadly and then used advanced settings or filters to omit terms and/or include others.
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=plain+shirt https://www.google.com/search?q=plain+shirt https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plain+shirt https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plain+shirt on edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-stripes https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-stripes
  • leephillips 6y ago
    So the - is working, contrary to the claims of several people here. The bottom line is that it is super easy to get results with shirts that don't have stripes, if you don't expect your search engine to understand English (which it would be wildly unrealistic to expect, and, besides, is not what you want).
    • nardi 6y ago
      So the - is working, contrary to the claims of several people here. I wouldn't say so. For the five images at the top of my search results, 3 of the 5 are striped, and 1 is plaid.
    • chrisan 6y ago
      Man that - operator is one of the first things I learned to help filter results. These days either my searches have become better or their interpretation/context has as I rarely have to use that anymore
    • ofTheMountain 6y ago
      While it is easy to get results based on certain keyword matching, Google has been publicly touting their ability to use NLP in search to better understand english. So this just shows a small limitation in their BERT models (https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...). Doesn't make it any less impressive.
  • cosmojg 6y ago
    Ah, but you see, he specifically wants a shirt without stripes as dialectically opposed to a shirt with stripes. A plain shirt just won't do. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmJVsaxoQSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmJVsaxoQSw
• Tade0 6y ago
  My Operating Systems professor (Tomasz Jordan Kruk, PhD) in college had an appropriate anecdote for this: "Humans usually don't intuitively understand the word 'no'. Please imagine a non-pink elephant."
  • davesque 6y ago
    Maybe you mean, "Please don't imagine a pink elephant." Imagining a non-pink elephant seems pretty easy.
    • throwawaymsft 6y ago
      Easy, after first imagining the pink elephant you aren't supposed to.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • natefox 6y ago
      Along these lines, I once heard somewhere that people do not process the word 'dont'. As a coach, I've had to shift my vocabulary to focus on the 'do's rather than the 'dont's Eg: If you're doing a sport where leaning forward is bad, avoid telling yourself 'dont lean forward' as your mind only hears 'lean forward', therefore reinforcing the thing you're trying to avoid. Alternatively, tell yourself 'lean back' or 'stay straight' or whatever you're focusing on for that maneuver or drill.
      • Tade0 6y ago
        Huh, the yoga teacher whose channel I'm subscribed to uses only "do" statements - didn't notice until you pointed that out.
      • rurp 6y ago
        Interestingly I've found this same approach from good coaches across completely different niche sports. I imagine this phenomenon has been discovered a number of times by various smart people. It certainly wasn't intuitive to me, but since learning to use affirmative advice in real-time sport situations, my advice got noticeably more effective.
• joshmn 6y ago
  Proof that SELECT with GROUP BY doesn't work if your tags aren't correct. Joking aside, it doesn't surprise me that this isn't being picked up — aren't most of these AI teams more R&D than actual public-facing? Maybe I'm just cynical though.
• vekker 6y ago
  I worked on an ingredient parser a few years ago. This exact kind of thing made things a lot more difficult than they seemed at first.
• JabavuAdams 6y ago
  bag of words?
• rammy1234 6y ago
  I see Bing is poor of the lot. It did not understand the "without" keyword
• rjurney 6y ago
  That darn conceptual search sure is hard :) The technical approach to achieving this involves a sentence embedding that then uses vector search to match documents based on a distance metric like cosine similarity. If you encode a description of a shirt in an embedding trained on all shopping item descriptions, it should match up with the search query. The trick is in getting a sentence embedding from a short query to match a longer description in a document description - long summaries of text in embeddings tends to average too much and cloud meaning. The other problem is including the vector search feature without screwing up other searches.
• ddebernardy 6y ago
  The correct query would have been "shirt -stripes". That works fine, or at least does on Google. But yeah, sentence parsing fail.
  • PeterCorless 6y ago
    Literally the first image that comes up for me is a striped shirt.
    • ddebernardy 6y ago
      No idea where you're from or what you did... https://imgur.com/a/XBzfOsF https://imgur.com/a/XBzfOsF Might your search history be so that you're so contrarian that Google suggests contrarian results? :D
• PeterCorless 6y ago
  Someone needs to learn how to use the ¬ operator.
• arnaudsm 6y ago
  I wonder why this problem hasn't been resolved yet, considering we had NLP systems capable of this for a decade now. Maybe it's too hard to scale to production. Or Pagerank is still better most of the time. Or plain old monopoly and risk aversion.
  • atupis 6y ago
    My bet is that sites are generally optimized to a keyword search and this kind NLP search engine would return subpar answers most cases.
• aerovistae 6y ago
  This comment would go from "unreadable" to "interesting" if you had phrased it as: "Vaguely similar to a joke from _the movie_ Ninotchka that _the Slovenian philosopher_ Zizek often uses...." Give people context. Don't assume people know what you know.
  • stuartaxelowen 6y ago
    This feels like a perfect example of how contextual natural language is!
    • ForHackernews 6y ago
      Somebody someone will developer a hipster AI capable of deciphering lefty twitter.
  • throwlaplace 6y ago
    Man you couldn't be more condescending if you tried. 1. Capital letters indicate proper nouns so syntactically it's clear Ninotchka is the name of something and Zizek is someone's name. 2. You contributed this wholly worthless comment using a device that has access to more information than any other in the history of the world. Are you also one of those people that asks people define words for you instead of looking them up when chatting with that person? Give people the benefit of the doubt. Don't assume ill-intentioned motives when there's no evidence for them.
    • derivagral 6y ago
      The GP didn't come across as ill-intended to me; it outlined an issue, gave a solution, and hopefully everyone who viewed it thought about context for half a second. I do agree with it that adding context to the comment is better than assuming random readers are going to actually look up capitalized names. Your comment, on the other hand, comes off as the one that's disparaging and includes a personal attack.
      • throwlaplace 6y ago
• robbiemitchell 6y ago
  In my experience, semantic embedding is simply not very good at taking negation into account.
• MaysonL 6y ago
  Reminds me of the difficult time I had finding socks without elastic.
• yters 6y ago
  Human level NLP is the halting problem, so unsurprising that AI cannot do simple expressions.
• crimsonalucard 6y ago
  In terms of AI, the following is literally the best I have ever seen and it's not even done by a professional (meaning you can make it too): https://aidungeon.io/ https://aidungeon.io/
• seiferteric 6y ago
  I have noticed in the past few years google results have become noticeable worse for similar reasons. Google used to _surprise_ me with how good it was able to understand what I was really looking for even when I put in vague terms. I remember being shocked on several occasions when putting in half remembered sentences, lyrics, expressions from something I had heard years ago and it being the first! result. I almost never have this experience anymore. Instead it seems to almost always return the "dumb" result, i.e. the things I was not looking for, even trying to avoid using clever search terms. It's almost like it is only doing basic word matching or something now. Also, usually the first page is all blogspam SEO garbage now.
  • fastball 6y ago
    That was when people built websites to deliver content. Now people build websites to get highly ranked in Google. No matter how good google's algos are, they can't win when the underlying content is just SEO'd garbage.
    • Nextgrid 6y ago
      SEO'd garbage often contains ads, including Google ads. There's no incentive for Google to fix this problem. Google's job is not to give you great search results, it's to keep you clicking on ads. Ideally it would be the ads on the search results page directly, but if that doesn't work then a blogspam website with Google ads is the next best thing. If Google was a paid service this problem would be solved the next day. Oh, and Pinterest would completely disappear from Google too. :)
      • kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
        > If Google was a paid service this problem would be solved the next day. Nope. Cable television was introduced with the promise of no ads. That didn't last long.
        • TomJansen 6y ago
          Spotify & YouTube Premium run without ads just fine, so why wouldn't it work for search engines? Text is way more compressible then music and video. So at least on serving data it is way more cheaper than the aforementioned services
• cachestash 6y ago
  Key question here, do all three even profess to using AI/ML in the search feature?
• dailypeeker 6y ago
  Why is everything a git repo when it could have been a blog post?
  • jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y ago
    Why do you think a blog post would've been better?
    • Minor49er 6y ago
      Because a repo is meant for source control. People are using the issue tracker to leave general comments. There's no reason to branch or fork a blog post. It pollutes the contributions metrics. That said, I don't really care how people use Github, but there are better blog solutions out there already that would make more sense to use. However, this aches of the old adage "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"
• cgb223 6y ago
  When the Robot Wars come we’ll all be wearing striped shirts as camouflage to confuse their AIs
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  I think, looking at shirt without stripes and shirt with out stripes in Google images, that without is decompounded, which then ends up giving you shirt with stripes, however the slight difference between the two searches "shirt without stripes" and "shirt with out stripes" is that the there are some exact hits mixed in also, so there are some results for "shirt without stripes" mixed in with the decompounded query. Just my theory.
• DangerousPie 6y ago
  Counterexample: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Doctors+Without+Borders https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Doctors+W...
  • crote 6y ago
    Is it, though? Try "Docters with borders".
• softwaredoug 6y ago
  In search we know it’s easy to cherry pick queries and criticize any search engine. A search engine is optimizing for billions of queries. Most of which are on the long tail. The real question is “shirts without stripes” really a query people enter? Or representative of a real pattern in the data?
  • altfredd 6y ago
    > A search engine is optimizing for billions of queries. Most of which are on the long tail. Citation needed. As far as my personal observations go, Google is NOT optimized for long tail at all. It is always trying to return most popular results from cache of most popular results. Once the cache is exhausted, Google starts to return completely irrelevant trash (anything after first two pages of search is pure spam and meaningless keyword soup). If you try to look up some obscure keyword and find nothing, try again after couple of months. There is a very high likehood, that you will see dozens of "new" results — most of them being from several years old pages. Perhaps, the actual long-tail searches still happen somewhere in background, but you are not going to see their output right away — instead you need to wait until they get committed to the nearby cache. Another alarming change, that happened relatively recently (4-5 years ago), is tendency to increase number of results at expense of match precision. A long time ago Google actually returned exact results when you quoted search phrase. Then they started to ignore quotes. Then they started to ignore some of search terms, if doing so results in greater number of results. Finally, Google gained horrifying ability to ignore MOST of search terms. OP's example probably has the same cause — Google's NLP knows the meaning of word "without". But Alphabet Inc. can't afford to hose all those websites, that use AdWords to sell you STRIPED SHIRTS. This would mean a loss of money! THE LOSS OF MONEY!!!
    • b3kart 6y ago
      I think what the original poster meant is that the tail is really long, and it's hard to cover it, hence these bad examples.
  • saalweachter 6y ago
    It's representative of a real pattern in queries, albeit maybe not the most common one. You'd most likely see this sort of query as a followup. The user types in [shirts], gets a bunch of results, some with stripes and some without, and wants to only see the results without. So they modify their query from [shirts] to [shirts without stripes]. And since most search applications are basically just finding you the results with the most keyword matches, with a little bit of extra magic thrown in, the above is basically what you see. These queries are basically the equivalent of optical illusions in cognitive psychology when studying the visual system -- seeing how the systems break tells you a lot about how they work. Have you ever seen shirt dresses in your dress shirt queries, or vice versa? The search application isn't caring enough about bigrams and compound words. Have you ever seen bowls in your bowling queries or fish in your fishing queries? The search application is over-stemming. Natural language search is a real pain on any general purpose search application, particularly ones that have to deal with titles. The obvious simple fix to this query is to rewrite [x without y] to [x -y], but then when someone goes to search for [a day without rain] or [a year without summer], you are going to totally break those queries.
• schmichael 6y ago
  Google Photo's search is a similar source of amusement for me. While it's quite good, it also fails fairly regularly and sometimes amusingly. For me "turtle" includes understandable mistakes like fish, a snail, and a rock that does look a bit like a turtle. However "turtle" also includes this, a picture of sequined slippers reflecting light?! https://i.imgur.com/4aSlA4B.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4aSlA4B.jpg I'm guessing one of those reflections looks like a turtle? Or maybe a pattern on the floor, wall, or rug? Although there are examples where I'm unsure if the AI is dumber than my 4yo or smarter than me. This is a result for "truck": https://i.imgur.com/JcgXZAG.jpg https://i.imgur.com/JcgXZAG.jpg Even (especially?) my 4yo knows those are Brio trains, not trucks. However, trains have components called trucks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotive_components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotive_components I'm unsure whether or not any of the wheel assemblies on these toy trains are considered trucks, so either the AI is extremely smart or slightly dumber than a 4yo.
  • dicytea 6y ago
    I can almost see the left slipper looking kinda like a head of a turtle
• tiborsaas 6y ago
  I get the author's point, but if you think about it, a search engine is a database that serves you results you want to see. Why should a search engine be fine tuned towards things you don't want see? If it's meaningful for some reason, then it works: https://www.google.com/search?q=woman+without+makeup&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=woman+without+makeup&tbm=isc... If it's an user error (like a dumb query) it fails and it shouldn't be a surprise: https://www.google.com/search?q=sea+without+ships&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=sea+without+ships&tbm=isch
• __ryan__ 6y ago
  Similarly, ask Siri to “play all of my music, except classical music”. Siri responds “OK, classical music coming up.”
• hombre_fatal 6y ago
  This is a good example of the bar HNers must have these days when they bafflingly assert that Google is somehow getting worse from what they remember. Google has gotten better, it's just HNer expectations that have changed as they expect more and more magic. For example, the subtitle on the repo is "Stupid AI" when this query has never worked in these search engines, and it won't anytime soon. You'd think the technical HN crowd would be more advanced than to make the same mistakes that (they complain that) stakeholders/users/gamers make when they mistakenly think everything is much easier than it actually is. Things aren't "stupid" just because they can't yet read your mind.
  • Nextgrid 6y ago
    > has never worked in these search engines I would expect there to be an e-commerce site or blog post somewhere containing a page with the exact title "shirts without stripes" and I'd expect it to be the first match.
• DenisM 6y ago
  This problem is known as "attribution" - you have a "no" or "without" in the sentence, but you don't know where it belongs. One could (and one does) argue that the problem cannot be solved with statistical methods (ML), especially not in any domain where accuracy is required, such as medical recored analysis: "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Zooming out, the language field breaks into several subfields: - A large group of Chomsky followers in academia are all about logical rules but very little in the way of algorithmic applicability, or even interest in such. - A large and well-funded group of ML practitioners, with a lot of algorithmic applicability, but arguably very shallow model of the language fails in cases like attribution. Neural networks might yet show improvement, but apparently didn't in this case. - A small and poorly funded group of "comp ling", attempting to create formalisms (e.g. HPSG) that are still machine-verifiable, and even generative. My girlfriends is doing PhD in this area, in particular dealing with modeling WH questions, so I get some glimpse into it; it's a pity the field is not seeing more interest (and funding).
  • animalCrax0rz 6y ago
    There is this, too, from 4 years ago, which seems reasonable in my not-very-well-informed opinion (speaking of which, I'm not sure the work referenced here can deal with hyphenated negation, but it should be simple to include) https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P14-1007.pdf https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P14-1007.pdf code: https://github.com/ffancellu/NegNN https://github.com/ffancellu/NegNN
    • DenisM 6y ago
      Thank you, I knew my effort was not for naught!
  • smoyer 6y ago
    While this is indeed an example of the attribution problem, I'd argue that this particular query will never be solved. I don't search for a "shirt without stripes", I search for a "solid <insert color here> shirt, or a "<insert color here> hawai'ian shirt". I'd be curious to see how many sentences with attribution problems actually have other structural issues. If I want to write clearly and without ambiguity, I rewrite sentences that have these problems. Why wouldn't I do the same for search queries?
• impostervt 6y ago
  This should be the next captcha model.
• aj7 6y ago
  Since I was a teenager, if someone energetically asserts a statement is “true” or “false,” I drop the true or false and evaluate the statement. In essence, their only communication to me is, ‘I think this is important!’ Often, why they think it’s important is more pressing than whether the statement is true.
• Skunkleton 6y ago
  Good thing search engines generally support a more machine-centric process for communicating intent. Try searching for "shirt -stripes". We are in a funny place with UIs.
• peter_retief 6y ago
  If you search for "plain shirt" its good If you add "plain shirt no stripes" it adds stripes Strangely "striped shirt" has some plain results.
• lostmsu 6y ago
  You got it backwards. This is the opposite of the problem I and many other people tend to have with search engines lately. I do not want the damn thing to combine words, exclude unpopular ones, and search for synonyms without me telling it to explicitly. As little as you can semantics please. If Google wants to group words by semantics, they should have a semantical grouping operator. For example "shirts (without stripes)". What if I am looking for a song text with these exact words in random positions? If what author wants was implemented, it would make my experience with Google even worse, unless it could think for me also. But then why would it need me in the first place?
• adamredwoods 6y ago
  I wonder if this is a need for humans need to learn search queries. "-stripes" instead of "without stripes". Or does input need to have basic filters applied before handing to ML? "without X" or "no X" = "-X"? Can be foiled with "shirt without having stripes".
• transreal 6y ago
  Searching "men without pants" versus "men with pants" gives much better results. This is a case where, while it makes sense to say the sentence, it's not a common use of language, and at the end of the day, the search engine will find what's written down, it's not a natural language processor yet (despite any marketing). Shirt stores don't advertise "Shirts without stripes - 20% off", they describe them as "Solid shirts" or "Plain shirts". Men's fashion blogs talk about picking "solid shirts" or "plain shirts" for a particular look. If I walked into a clothing store and asked for "shirts without stripes", the sales person would most likely laugh and say "er, you mean you want plain shirts?". Plain shirts/solid shorts are the most common way to refer to these, and people seem to be searching this way: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=solid%20shirts,plain%20shirts,shirts%20without%20stripes https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=solid%20... Regarding moving towards natural language processing - the "without" part is not as important as knowing the context. My kids will ask me to get from the bakery things like "the round bread with a hole and seeds", which I know means "sesame bagel", or "the sticky bread", which means "cinnamon twists" - which I understand because I know the context. Sometimes they say "I want the red thingy", and I need to ask a bunch of questions to eventually get at what they want (sometimes it's a red sweater, sometimes it's cranberry juice). Unless Google starts asking questions back, I don't think there is any way it can give you what you want right away.
  • pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Thankfully, "men without pants" shows me exclusively men wearing pants, underpants that is, as I'm in the UK. Searching "pants" only shows me "trousers", that's a big fail for Google IMO, I'm accessing google.co.uk.
  • dkdbejwi383 6y ago
    Similarly, "sandwich with cheese" is probably going to return more relevant results than "sandwich without scorpions"
• need_more_bort 6y ago
  So I’d have to ask, is the problem the AI doesn’t intuit “without stripes”, find shirts that satisfy that condition (what kind of shirts? Dress shirts? T shirts?) and then do an image search identifing shirts and their quality of stripeyness
• longtermd 6y ago
  A pretty accurate descriptions of the State of AI ;D jk
• albertzeyer 6y ago
  Why should it not be possible to solve this with statistical methods? The model just needs to be able to understand the important meaning of "no" in here, in the context of the whole sentence. I would guess that most modern NNs from the NLP area (Transformer or LSTM) would be able to correctly differentiate the meaning. The problem is, I think there is no fancy NN (yet) behind Google search, and the other web searches. To extend on that, you can think of the human brain as just another (powerful) statistical model.
  • animalCrax0rz 6y ago
    "there is no evidence of cancer" and "there is evidence of no cancer" are two different statements with different meaning, so it's more complex a task than just understanding the importance of "no" in a sentence. It's involves semantic analysis of the sentence. The paper I linked to below describes a technique they call "deep parsing." Check it out for more context.
    • dhimes 6y ago
      While it was an interesting point, it doesn't seem completely applicable here. Presumably the classifications include context. "A shirt with no stripes" should be distinguishable from "a stripes with no shirt" in the this context.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • londt8 6y ago
      I tried to search for "cheese without holes" on Google and it yielded good results. I think the problem here is that the query is something people would rarely search.
      • jjnoakes 6y ago
        I just searched google images for "cheese" and "cheese without holes" and I got roughly the same results (about 1/3 of the images had holes in both cases).
• wwarner 6y ago
  I thought the minus prefix instead of "without" would exclude "stripes", but it doesn't (any more).
• pugworthy 6y ago
  Interestingly, Google can handle these searches just fine... "birds without flight" "cars without wheels" "cats without tails" "dogs without hair" "intersections without lights" "poems without rhyme" "shirts without collars" (also "sleeves", "shoulders", "buttons", "logos", "pockets", and more)
  • lolc 6y ago
    That's because all these things are readily labelled by humans as such. So they don't have to understand the sentence. Just match it.
    • disqard 6y ago
      There's a larger, nuanced point here: statistical ML based "AI" is simply an API over aggregated samples of human intelligence. The sampling suffers from bias (the "white men" example in this thread), gaps (the OP's example, which relies on "shirts without stripes" being an uncommon, though perfectly acceptable phrase), and many more such shortcomings of what is essentially "rote learning".
    • pugworthy 6y ago
      I somewhat agree, but for me personally, "car without wheels" and "shirt without stripes" are about equal in terms of usage regularity. I'd also say nobody uses the phrase "birds without flight", but instead "flightless birds". I'd imagine people say "hairless dogs" a lot more often than "dogs without hair". And the shirt examples show that there are many uses of the lead phrase "shirts without" that work just fine, but for some reason "stripes" really stands out far beyond the others. "Shirts without shoulders" is kind of a bizarre term to match, when almost all search results show "off the shoulder" or "cold shoulder" as the thing being matched.
      • lolc 6y ago
        I have to agree with you on "birds without flight". Google does manage to infer "flightless" from "without flight".
  • 6y ago
• melvinram 6y ago
  `shirt -stripes` gives the type of results one would expect. I guess we haven't reached that level of natural language processing yet.
• fpoling 6y ago
  Searching in Russian on Yandex gives the same ridiculous results.
• lavp 6y ago
  For the google search, I get better results by typing "shirt -stripes". Still not perfect, but it's better than the seemingly redundant 'without'.
• paulftw 6y ago
  Are they also building AI cars that drive without accidents?
• twodave 6y ago
  I'm actually not sure I expect this much from a search engine. Typically there is going to be a useful word to describe what you want without having to hope it can understand "no" or "without" (for example, without stripes -> "solid" or even "NOT striped" in many cases). Anyone with a programming background knows there is an art to forming useful search queries--it is an acquired skill. I'd personally much rather the engine bring back predictable results given mundane rules and keywords than attempt to understand sentences using an opaque method of understanding.
  • elicash 6y ago
    I think Google should design primarily for people who DON'T know a ton about crafting queries, even if it's at the expense of a much smaller number of folks who are experts. That said, this seems like an obvious place for improvement where both groups can be made happy.
    • twodave 6y ago
      I agree that's a valid argument, probably a more sensible approach, even if it does make me a little sad :)
• VohuMana 6y ago
  Is it just me or does it feel like in the last couple years all of these companies have had the quality of their search go down? I've noticed large portions of my search will go ignored and it will just grab the most popular terms in my search rather than searching all terms.
• neycoda 6y ago
  How does a search engine know whether you wanted shirts that didn't have stripes or results that contained the words shirts, without, and stripes?
• varelaz 6y ago
  Problem here is not about negation, but there is no product that's described as "shirt without stripes". Stripes and shirt will come together in a different sense, since Google cannot find whole phrase it has to find parts. For example check for "shirt without shoulders"
• downshun 6y ago
  It's called plain, as in plain shirt. PEBKAC
• js2 6y ago
  If it were butter, you'd want an unstriped shirt. If it were provolone, you'd want a non-striped shirt. But because it's neither of those, I think you just want a "shirt" or maybe, a "plain shirt". Indeed, I get much better results with either of the latter two search terms. There's no need to mention stripes at all, since no pattern is the default state, isn't it?
• rubatuga 6y ago
  Also, what really angers me is when websites don't support the minus operator for search queries. It's a simple feature introduced decades ago!
• arkanciscan 6y ago
  BUT THEY HAD MILK!
• billiam 6y ago
  It's a shopping problem, not a language problem, according to these companies.
• kitplummer 6y ago
  Why is this a Github repo? I can't get past the abuse of a git repository.
  • sceptically 6y ago
    +1
• mv4 6y ago
  Not surprising. Also, "shirt -stripe" might product better results.
  • jayd16 6y ago
    This works quite well but don't add the quotation marks.
    • mv4 6y ago
      right
• kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  On a meta note, I am a bit tired of HN submissions being used more as "Writing Prompts" rather than as links to substantive material. This thread is an excellent example. The author of the linked page didn't have the decency to actually make a substantive point, instead sharing three screenshots and posting the link here, chumming the HN waters with the kind of stuff that brings in the sharks from far and wide. Bashing on big cos: Check Vague pronouncements about AI: Check Generic side-swipes about 'ad revenue': Check This is why a coherent thesis is required to even initiate a proper discussion, because in the absence of that it invariably devolves to lowest-common-denominator shit-flinging.
• dtunkelang 6y ago
  As others have pointed out, most search engines don't support natural language search in general, let alone natural language negation in particular. There are several reasons for this, including the following: 1) Natural language understanding for search has gotten a lot better, but it is still not as robust as keyword matching. The upside of delighting some users with natural language understanding doesn't yet justify the downside of making the experience worse for everyone else. 2) Most users today don't use natural language search queries. That is surely a chicken-and-egg problem: perhaps users would love to use natural language search if it worked as well or better than keyword search. But that's where we are today. So, until there's a breakthrough, most search engine developers see more incremental gain from optimizing some form of keyword search than from trying to support natural language search. 3) Even if the search engine understands the search query perfectly, it still has to match that interpretation against the documentation representation. In general, it's a lot easier to understand a query like "shirt with stripes" than to reliably know which of the shirts in the catalog do or don't have stripes. No one has perfectly clean, complete, or consistent data. We need not just query understanding, but item understanding too. 4) Negation is especially hard. A search index tends to focus on including accurate content rather than exhaustive content. That makes it impossible to distinguish negation from not knowing. It's the classic problem of absence of evidence is not being evidence of absence. This is also a problem for keyword and boolean search -- negating a word generally won't negate synonyms or other variations of that word. 5) The people maintaining search indexes and searchers co-evolve to address -- or at least work around -- many of these issues. For example, most shoppers don't search for a "dress without sleeves"; they search for a "sleeveless dress". Everyone is motivated to drive towards a shared vocabulary, and that at least addresses the common cases. None of this is to say that we shouldn't be striving to improve the way people and search engines communicate. But I'm not convinced that an example like this one sheds much light on the problem. If you're curious to learn more about query understanding, I suggest you check out https://queryunderstanding.com/introduction-c98740502103 https://queryunderstanding.com/introduction-c98740502103
• _pmf_ 6y ago
  But muh "autonomous driving is almost there".
• kebman 6y ago
  shirt -stripes Thank me later. :D
• GnarfGnarf 6y ago
  Why not simply say "shirt -stripes" (negation in front of "stripes").
• captainmuon 6y ago
  This is something that has annoyed me since the Altavista times. I want to search for "madonna but not the singer", and find pictures of the holy icon. I can do "madonna -singer", but that fails if the page mentions the word "singer" a single time. Even if it is "This is a page about madonna statues, but not about the famous singer." It would be great if I could add negative keywords to a website, or mark text as "don't index" or "index with a negative weight". But probably, people would game this in ways I can't imagine. There is probably a clever ML solution for this, like having meaning-vectors for distinct ideas, and pushing pages that are close to one meaning away from the other meaning. Classification is easy if you have a keywords like "painting" and "catholic", but if it is "virgin" or "prayer" then it could be either meaning, so there is never a bullet-proof solution.
• activatedgeek 6y ago
  I'm sorry but what's the point being made here? Search results could be better? Sure. Can we find adversarial examples? Almost always.
• obarthelemy 6y ago
  Reminds me of the the challenge: "Don't think of a cow !" What did you just think of ? A cow, of cowrse. If you want a shirt w/o stripes, just google "plain shirt" or "dress shirt -stripes.
• leonardopucci 6y ago
  I think that query analysis in terms of volume of actual people using this query will show that very little people if any actually type "shirt without stripes". Once enough people do it, feedback is accumulated that results are bad (by CTR analysis), and results will auto-correct.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  This is amusing but not a problem.
• realo 6y ago
  Tried this on amazon.ca (instead of .com) and got quite a different, but also amazing, result... https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=shirt+without+stripes&ref=nb_sb_noss https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=shirt+without+stripes&ref=nb_sb_no...
• harimau777 6y ago
  It seems to me that the problem isn't so much that this search performs incorrectly. Rather it is that many search engines have removed the tools that allowed a user to specify exactly what they are looking for (e.g. shirt -stripes).
• willdearden 6y ago
  One time I ordered from stitch fix and asked for “a shirt which is not red, white, and blue” and got a red, white, and blue shirt.
• skizm 6y ago
  Could this be an SEO opportunity to capture some simple negative phrases like this?
• GuB-42 6y ago
  Fun experiment on Google: - Shirt Without Stripes: shirts where the description contains both "without" and "stripes". Example: a shirt without collar, with stripes. - "Shirt Without Stripes": a mess, with and without stripes, suggesting an unusual search query. In fact, the linked article site is the first result in web search. - Stripeless shirt: sexy women in strapless shirts - "stripeless shirt": pictures of Invader Zim... - "stripeless" shirt: mostly shirts without stripes, but there are some shirts with stripes that are described as stripeless... The last one may give us a hint at the problem. If you have to mention a shirt is without stipes, you are probably comparing is to a shirt with stripes. For example imagine a forum, some guy is posting a picture of a shirt with stripes, I can expect some people to ask questions like "do they sell this shirt without stripes"? Or maybe the seller himself may have a something like "shirt without stripes available here (link)" in the description. So the search engines tie "shirt without stripes" to pictures of shirts with stripes. I remember an incident where searching for "jew" on Google led to antisemitic websites. The reason was simply that that exact word was rarely used in other contexts. Mainstream and Jewish source tend to use the words "jews" and "jewish" but not "jew". And because Google doesn't look at the dictionary meanings of words but rather what people use them for, you get issues like that.
  • knodi123 6y ago
    > The reason was simply that that exact word was rarely used in other contexts I had a similar problem when I was trying to convince a friend that homeopathy was a complete and utter fraud with absolutely no basis in reality. She was convinced that the internet's overwhelming consensus was that homeopathy was valuable and regular doctors were control-freaks who make things up when they don't know the answers. To prove her point, she did an internet search for allopathic medicine and showed me how the majority of the results were negative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allopathic_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allopathic_medicine Just a humorous anecdote, not trying to start any conversations about the relative value of different medical paradigms.
• l0b0 6y ago
  "shirt -stripes" seems to work on google.com at least, even though they and others like DDG have been getting really bad at ignoring "-foo" terms recently.
• moultano 6y ago
  Ya'll might be interested in this paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.13528 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.13528 > in particular, it shows clear insensitivity to the contextual impacts of negation.
• cfv 6y ago
  While I'm sure this is A Hard Problem to solve by NLP I for whatever reason was under the impression that this is trivial to special-case. As in, "X without Y" sounds like a common enough use case to have it's own little parser branch in places as big as Google or Amazon
  • hbosch 6y ago
    I mean, if I google the phrase "shirts -stripes" and click the Images tab I see mainly shirts without stripes. So it's essentially the same input, and essentially the same expected output, but there must be quite a knot between understanding the word "without" and literally just using the - operator.
    • cfv 6y ago
      Right, but the - operator requires prior knowledge that the search engine understands boolean operators and that a -b is an alias of "listings with a on their text that don't have b in their text too" whereas "a without b" is inmediately recognizable by whoever is writing the search as "I want something of kind A without property B"
• aaron695 6y ago
  Not sure if people actually search for "Shirt Without Stripes" or this was picked for academia over what is actually needed But make a script that scrapes the top X results for these sites. Get your own AI / humans to rate it. Make it competitive for these large sites <==> give them an incentive.
• deleted 6y ago
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• kator 6y ago
  Joe: "Hey is Lisa back from vacation?" Larry: "I saw a red Lamborghini in the parking lot!" Most people will assume Lisa is driving a red Lamborghini and back from Vacation, meanwhile, all the bots are searching for Lamborghini vacations and trying to figure out what's going on in the conversation.
• dpcan 6y ago
  Yes, exclusive search is a huge problem. You have to know to search for "solid colored shirt", but when you can't think of this variation of search, or maybe there isn't one, exclusion is your only option, and it's broken.
• wooders 6y ago
  We're a company coming out of the YC W20 batch working on the product attribution problem http://glisten.ai/ http://glisten.ai/. There's too many products nowadays to be manually attributed (e.g. pattern=stripes), making it hard return good results even with entity resolution for queries. We train classifiers to categorize products, including what something is not, using their images and descriptions.
• kleer001 6y ago
  "shirt -stripes" works, wtf?
• ddlutz 6y ago
  Noticed something interesting, if you search for 'shirt without sleeves' in google images, you DO get sleeveless shirts. So why doesn't this work with stripes?
  • mr_toad 6y ago
    I’m guessing that BERT understands that ‘without sleeves’ and sleeveless means the same thing, and there are images labelled as sleeveless shirts. But there probably aren’t many images labelled as stripeless. I’m not sure why BERT doesn’t try shirt -stripes.
• deleted 6y ago
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• ltbarcly3 6y ago
  Here's another fun fact about how commerce search engines work (I spent a couple of years on this): Negations sidestep almost all of the algorithms that try to provide an improved result set, and fall through to pure text relevancy. So try searching on amazon for shirt, then search for: shirt -xkxkxkxk. Since xkxkxkxk doesn't match any documents, the negation should have no effect, but it does, the effect it has is to sidestep all the fancy relevancy work and hardcoded query rewrite rules, domcat rules, demand and sales/impression statistics etcetc, and give you basically awful search results. You don't even get shirts.
• deleted 6y ago
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• AA-BA-94-2A-56 6y ago
  Did nobody tell OP you can search "shirt -stripes"?
• c3534l 6y ago
  If you select "I don't like this recommendation" for a video on youtube, you will get to provide feedback on why you did so: either "I don't like this video" or "I've already watched this video." I've pressed the latter on literally thousands of videos at this point, and after well over a year of this, YouTube still hasn't figured out that I don't want to be recommended videos that I've already watched. Likewise, Google says I should log into their website for personalized search results, but after years of always clicking on Python 3 results over Python 2.7 results, it never learned to show me the correct result. Eventually I realized that personalized recommendations are more or less just a thin cover for collecting vast amounts of data with no benefit to the consumer. I believe we have the technology to do better, but we don't use it. In fact, we seem to be using it less and less.
  • disqard 6y ago
    My experience has been that most ads that "follow me around" peddle the exact same thing I purchased most recently. No, I will not buy a second electric kettle again, let alone the exact make and model that I now own. I'd rather have generic ads, so I might discover some new product that I could (at least in theory) actually buy.
• ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I love this. It is such an easy to grasp example of what is "wrong" with search. Historically, searching was keyword based so documents with "shirt" and "stripes" would rank highly, even though none of those pages had the keyword "without". As humans we know immediately that the search is for documents about shirts where stripes are not present. But the term 'without' doesn't make it through to the term compositor step which is feeding terms in a binary relationship. We might make such a relationship as Q = "shirt" AND NOT "stripes" You could onebox it (the Google term for a search short circuit path that recognizes the query pattern and some some specific action, for example calculations are a onebox) and then you get a box of shirts with no stripes and an bunch of query results with. You can n-gram it, by ranking the without-stripes n-gram higher than the individual terms, but that doesn't help all that much because the English language documents don't call them "shirts without stripes", generally they are referred to as "plain shirts" or "solid shirts" (plain-shirt(s) and solid-shirt(s) respectively). But you might do okay punning without-stripes => plain or to solid. From a query perspective you get better accuracy with the query "shirts -stripes". This algorithmic query uses unary minus to indicate a term that should not be on the document but it isn't very friendly to non-engineer searchers. Finally you can build a punning database, which is often done with misspellings like "britney spears" (ok so I'm dating my tenure with that :-)) which takes construction terms like "without", "with", "except", "exactly" and creates an algorithmic query that is most like the original by simple substitution. This would map "<term> without <term>" => "<term> -<term>". The risk there is that "doctors without borders" might not return the organization on the first page (compare results from "doctors without borders" and "doctors -borders", ouch!) When people get sucked into search it is this kind of problem that they spend a lot of time and debate on :-)
• aaronsnoswell 6y ago
  Brilliant :)
• flamtap 6y ago
  In the Amazon app, a search for “shirt without stripes” now get corrected to “shirt without strips”.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• eggie5 6y ago
  simple LTR w/ clickstream data would fix this easy
• lgessler 6y ago
  A good demonstration of the linguistic fact that far from being meaningless, prepositions (adpositions, more generally) are actually highly consequential for meaning and are highly ambiguous between different meanings. Here's a paper that'll give you a good appreciation of this from an NLP perspective if you're curious: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W16-1712.pdf https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W16-1712.pdf
• quickthrower2 6y ago
  "Plain shirt" works a charm though. What is a 'shirt without stripes' anyway? That could be a shirt with diamonds? Or a plain one? Or a Hawaiian shirt? What is the expected result, can we agree?
  • notRobot 6y ago
    > What is a 'shirt without stripes' anyway It is a shirt with anything except stripes.
    • quickthrower2 6y ago
      Cool but what is the search intent? It's a bit like saying "Google gimme something that ain't a ukulele"
• DonHopkins 6y ago
  Stay positive: "solid shirts" works just fine.
• civil_engineer 6y ago
  Wikipedia gets it wrong too: Try “men without hats” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Without_Hats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Without_Hats
• voldacar 6y ago
  Doesn't Peter Norvig work at google? maybe they should pick up his book
• softwarejosh 6y ago
  its obvious but the solution is shirt -stripes until we make ai interpret attributes
• imgabe 6y ago
  Humans can kind of make some assumptions based on context, but it's really just a poorly defined, vague query. What if you walked into a store and asked an associate for a shirt without stripes? What would you get? Probably some further questions for clarification. What about checked shirts? Floral prints? Plaid? Do you want no pattern at all? T-shirt? Polo shirt? Dress shirt? Granted, the AI results are particularly bad because they give you the one thing that you specifically didn't ask for, but that's also the only information you provided. Defining a query in terms of what you don't instead of what you do isn't going to go well. What if you went to google and said "Show me all the webpages that aren't about elephants"? Sure, you'd get something, but would it be anything useful?
• ggggtez 6y ago
  Perhaps, but would you really say "Hi, I'm wearing a shirt without stripes"? It's a completely artificial construct. Simply the fact that this hacker-news entry is the #1 search result shows that real human people do not perform this search in significant quantity. But we can quantify that with data to backup the assumption [1][2]. When people want to buy a shirt without stripes, they do not describe the shirt by what it doesn't have. In fact, it's trivial to cherry pick a random selection of words that on the face of it sounds like something a human might search for, but it turns out never occurs in practice. Add to that the fact that the term is being searched without quotes [3], which results in the negation not actually being attached to anything. Do you go to a store to buy it along with your Pants Without Suspenders, Socks Without Animal Print, and other items defined purely by what they don't have? [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22white%20tshirt%22,%22shirt%20without%20stripes%22 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22white%2... [2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22plain%20shirt%22,shirt%20without%20stripes https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22plain%2... [3] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=plain%20shirt,shirt%20without%20stripes https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=plain%20sh...
• hajimuz 6y ago
  It’s like the plot in the movie Inception. How to plan an idea “don’t think elepant” to an human idea?
• dvduval 6y ago
  Most important is what the advertisements at the top show. The organic results are so yesterday. The Google Ads AI should already be teaching you that All you base belong to us.
• danielovichdk 6y ago
  Result without correct match!
• dEnigma 6y ago
  This contrasts with my query of "guys in jean jumpers singing too ra loo ra loo" a few years back, which Google correctly identified as "Come on Eileen" by Dexys Midnight Runners. To this day my favourite search experience.
• jpswade 6y ago
  Google search doesn’t work that way, it’s still based on how we link to things. Nobody would describe a plain shirt as a shirt without stripes unless it’s within that context.
• wordabby 6y ago
  On a positive note Google used to have trouble with a query like "words with q without u", now the top 5 pages at least all show the correct results, eg: https://word.tips/words-with/q/without/u/ https://word.tips/words-with/q/without/u/
• thedeviantdev 6y ago
  Try searching Google for 'white couples' and 'black couples'. The former returns lots of mixed race couples, mostly not white couples. However the latter returns black couples. What is going on here? Similar phenomenon perhaps?
• inopinatus 6y ago
  Tortoise: But we must be careful in combining sentences. For instance you’d grant that “Politicians lie” is true, wouldn’t you? Achilles: Who could deny it? Tortoise: Good. Likewise, “Cast-iron sinks” is a valid utterance, isn’t it? Achilles: Indubitably. Tortoise: Then, putting them together, we get “Politicians lie in cast iron sinks”. Now that’s not the case, is it? ---- Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books, 1979
• V-2 6y ago
  I believe the future of AI, as showcased by this simple usecase, is not one central AI such as Google search engine recognizing the context, but rather each of us having a "smart assistant" with a personalized, trained understanding of the contexts that we mean. And it's only that smart assistant that automates coping with the deficiencies of a one-size-fits-all central solution, finding me shirts with no stripes by using a rather dumb search engine. (Or "a pizza I would like", etc.)
• prvc 6y ago
  On a related note, Google seems to favor forum replies which instruct users to perform a search in order to find the answer to the question that they had asked.
• tempodox 6y ago
  Stripes seem to hold an irresistible attraction for impostor “AI”.
• Despoisj 6y ago
  What about using the "-" sign to filter results instead of relying on complex language understanding? => "shirt -stripes" works pretty well on google at least
• sceptically 6y ago
  Just a short question: Why does someone choose to publish something like that on github?
  • detaro 6y ago
    because it is easy for them?
    • larrybud 6y ago
      with one more click, they could have turned this into a 'real' website using github pages.
• heavenlyblue 6y ago
  To be fair, the only thing that Google needs to do internally is to match this query to “shirt -stripe” and then you’ll get the necessary answer. The bigger question is why they are not doing that.
• otikik 6y ago
  Poignant but accurate. On Amazon's side of things I would also include the obnoxious "Hey you just bought a pair of sneakers so now I will change all your recommendations to sneakers".
• fortran77 6y ago
  Here's a better example: "shirt without sleeves" That something that someone may actually search for. (At least the guys at my gym would!) And Amazon gets it mostly wrong.
• mirimir 6y ago
  Searching "plain shirts" does in fact yield results for shirts without patterns. And "paisley shirts" works too. So it's not such a big deal that negation doesn't work. Also, "shirts -stripes" does seem to work in both Amazon and Google. Or at least, I see no striped shirts.
• rjurney 6y ago
  The latest embeddings/networks like BERT can handle encoding this logic. They take the surrounding words in context when they're encoded. Google can do this now, for example in a prototype. The tough thing is to get it to consumer-grade quality without messing up other searches. The QA process is utterly brutal because one weird search can be a scandal.
• carapace 6y ago
  shirt -stripes > "Am I going crazy or is it the world around me!?" Fishbone - Drunk Skitzo https://youtu.be/SaPGH4Yd_zc?t=231 https://youtu.be/SaPGH4Yd_zc?t=231 (Apologies for the snarky low-content flip reply.)
• dk8996 6y ago
  I'm kinda late to this conversation but there are companies and Engineers trying to solve this problem basically adding more "semantics" to visual content. Good place to start is with this blog from Pinterest. https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/pinsage-a-new-graph-convolutional-neural-network-for-web-scale-recommender-systems-88795a107f48 https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/pinsage-a-new-graph...
• pvtmert 6y ago
  Since there is no context is provided, I do not expect it to understand prepositions itself. Given exact query to human, they create environment thus context themselves. It may also depend on whom you are asking to. For example, myself, entering this site to find out news about software & tech. Also since 'Stripe' is a company name, I assumed link will get the list of shirt shops who do not accept Stripe as a payment method/provider. (Thus some kind of protest related thing) I literally thought about that yesterday and did not see the page thinking "That's too much for tonight". Now seeing topic is somewhat very different.
• partomniscient 6y ago
  "shirts without stripes" results: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirts+without+stripes&ref=nb_sb_noss https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirts+without+stripes&ref=nb_sb_... "shirts -stripes" results: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirts+-stripes&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirts+-stripes&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 So basically the AI doesn't convert "without x" to "-x" even though the basic capability needed is there. This is why AI is a hard problem, especially when it meets the real world. It's 2020 and we're still quibbling about the terminology used in SQL, what did we expect?