For the google search, I get better results by typing "shirt -stripes". Still not perfect, but it's better than the seemingly redundant 'without'.
Shirt Without Stripes
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Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#272Why 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 searche…
"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.
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.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#273I 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…
Google was good at launch because it was harvesting data from webrings and directories to provide it "high quality" link ranking data. However, they didn't thank or credit or share any of their revenue with the sites whose human curation helped their results become so impressive. Seeing that Google search was effective, most human curators stopped curating directories and webrings. The SEO industry picked up the slack and began curating "blogs" that are junk links to junk products. This pair of outcomes led to the gradual and ongoing decay of Google's result quality.
Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" evaluation or not, since they can't tell the difference between "an amateur who's put in 20 years and just writes haphazardly" and "an SEO professional who uses Markov-generated text to juice links". They have started to select "human-curated" sources of knowledge to promote above search results, which has resulted in various instances of e.g. a political party's search results showing a parody image. They simply cannot evaluate trust without the data they initially harvested to make their billions, and without curation their algorithm will continue to fail.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
You're arguing the search is "good enough". Because we can adapt to the machines. But the company who will not force us to do so will get our business. The company who creates the best digital butler will win. They know this. They try hard. And they still fail at simple stuff when judged by humans.
Another possibility is that maybe it really is "good enough", and they get a bigger advantage by competing with each other on more important aspects of usability than these kind of trivial issues
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#275Are they also building AI cars that drive without accidents?
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#276I'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.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#277Is 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.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#278How does a search engine know whether you wanted shirts that didn't have stripes or results that contained the words shirts, without, and stripes?
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#279Interestingly, 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)
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.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#280I 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…
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