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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#121

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

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".

And "shirt without stripes" doesn't mean solid color shirt either. Could have spots. Could be Hawaiian print. Is plaid striped?

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#122

Probably not surprising that most people don’t know, but negative keyword search works on all these platforms: shirt -stripes

This sounds great, right? But consider the recommendation engines that are part of Amazon, Stack Overflow, whatever. You've just filtered out pages that have a shirt without stripes on it ... but have a striped shirt somewhere in a recommendation bar on the page.

I've run into so many variations of this. You can search for something only to have the recommendation/related results embedded on whatever page to throw off your results one way or another.

I genuinely think that whatever standard HTML/XTHML is at ought to have, either as an attribute or a semantic tag, some kind of "related" or "recommended" ability to set that content apart. My cynical thought is that even if it were adopted, it would probably get abused in some fashion.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#123
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.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#124

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)

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.

I was searching for a DisplayPort adapter for a Mac Mini and got MiniDisplayPort adapters for Mac :(

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#125
post #28

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.

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.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results are exactly what I would expect and hope to get.

When you search for “shirt without stripes” you expect and hope to get shirts and t-shirts with stripes?

On one hand you complain about Google assuming too much, on the other you want more interpretation. You can't have both.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#127
post #13

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.

Every systems sucks at NLP. It is an extremely hard problem and we are nowhere near matching the human cerebral cortex.

Generally, yes. But you can go very far and cover a lot of cases when you stick to a narrow domain and common patterns that customers of your product will typically use.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#130
post #28

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.

That sounds like an ad business version of the efficient market theory. E.g, that can't possibly be a hundred dollar bill on the ground, because if it was someone else would surely already have picked it up by now.

I think you're overestimating Google's sophistication.

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