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?
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.