Live data from Hacker News

Shirt Without Stripes

github.com

231–240 of 639 posts

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#231

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…

I suspect their job has gotten way harder. It's easy to forget that they aren't just passively indexing. The web is basically google's adversary, with every page trying to be top ranked regardless of whether it "should" be.

I think it's disingenuous to say "the web is basically google's adversary" when Google AdWords is the reason so many pages fight for top ranking.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#233
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect most users genuinely looking for such a product would just search "plain shirt"

That is an inclusive search though. What if the user actually wanted to simply exclude stripes but wanted to see polka dots and paisley?

I think that is probably not a common enough use case to optimize for. Additionally it would be easy for a user in that position to just search "shirt" and ignore the occasional striped one, or to search "polka dot" and "paisley" seperately

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#234
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect most users genuinely looking for such a product would just search "plain shirt"

Assumptions like this is what makes search so terrible for many many companies. You can't assume that customers would type one thing or another - you need to gather lots of query log data and see what you find. You'd be surprised how much variation there is, but once you do have this data you can then find patterns to cover lots of (but not all) cases.

Of course, they should look at the data before making such an assumption. I am not suggesting otherwise, I'm just making a guess as to why it's been done this way. I suspect they have looked at the data and identified that it is not a common use case.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#235

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.

That point is akin to stating: These three companies have not solved the hard problem of common sense [1], so are not allowed to advertise their AI without looking silly.

Nobody has solved the common sense knowledge problem yet. A solution for that would qualify as Artificial General Intelligence and pass the Turing Test.

But search engines have come a long way. I even suspect that when search engines place too much logical - or embedding relevance to stop words such as "without", that, on average, the relevant metrics would go down. It is not completely ignored as "shirt with stripes" surfaces more striped shirts than "shirt without stripes". "shirt -stripes" does what you want it to do.

Searching for "white family USA" shows a lot of interracial families. Here "white" is likely not ignored as much, and thus it surfaces pages with images where that word is explicitly mentioned, which is likely happening when describing race.

You can use Google to find Tori Amos when searching for "redhead female singer sings about rape". Bing surfaces porn sites. DDG surfaces lists (top 100 female singers) type results. The Wikipedia page that Google surfaces does not even contain the word "redhead", yet it falls back to list style results when removing "redhead" from your query, suggesting "redhead" and "Tori Amos" are close in their semantic space. That's impressive progress over 10-20 years back.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsense_knowledge_(artific...

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#236

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.

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?

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#237

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.

At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.

What is your point?

The google image search you did -- did not provide incorrect answers, unlike the OP's

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#238

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.

At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.

Most of the person results appear to be 'Time Person of the Year' related. Another result is a guy with the last name Person. The results don't seem to be related to the definition of the word 'person'.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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)

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#240

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.

I disagree, "shirt without stripes" is an unusual word choice, not one that our ML models would be optimized for. Try "solid color shirt" and you'll see how much better the results are - at least on Google.

“Chicken without head”, “men without pants”, “sky without clouds” only work because the users uploading the images tended to tag them as such... (in that case the users do the hard coding of meaning)
Post reply on HN