Shirt Without Stripes • Hacker News Board

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#101

Post by jorvi » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

shanecleveland wrote: post #72

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 i…

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.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#102

Post by cosmojg » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #74

https://www.google.com/search?q=plain+shirt https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plain+shirt on edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-stripes

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

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#103

Post by rammy1234 » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

I see Bing is poor of the lot. It did not understand the "without" keyword

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#104

Post by scabarott » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #41

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Reminds me of this: https://www.amazon.com/End-History-Last-Man/dp/0743284550

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#105

Post by rammy1234 » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #74

https://www.google.com/search?q=plain+shirt https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plain+shirt on edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-stripes

Author's idea is the negative keyword. "Without"

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#106

Post by rjurney » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

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.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#107

Post by ofTheMountain » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #87

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #74

https://www.google.com/search?q=plain+shirt https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plain+shirt on edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-stripes

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).

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-unde...). Doesn't make it any less impressive.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#108

Post by Justin_K » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

joshmn wrote: post #55

alexpapworth wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it's really just a series of if statements?

Don't get ahead of yourself: it's SELECT with GROUP BY.

Don't forget

AND keyword LIKE '%searchStr%'

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#109

Post by throwawaymsft » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

davesque wrote: post #89

Tade0 wrote: post #81

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."

Maybe you mean, "Please don't imagine a pink elephant." Imagining a non-pink elephant seems pretty easy.

Easy, after first imagining the pink elephant you aren't supposed to.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#110

Post by leephillips » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

throwaway55554 wrote: post #90

Ugohcet wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 k…

«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.