Shirt Without Stripes • Hacker News Board

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#421

Post by lolc » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

pugworthy wrote: post #408

lolc wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I somewhat agree, but for me personally, "car without wheels" and "shirt without stripes" are about equal in terms of usage regularity. I'd also say nobody uses the phrase "birds without flight", but instead "flightless birds". I'd imagine people say "hairless dogs" a lot more often than "dogs without hair". And the shirt examples show that there are many uses of the lead phrase "shirts without" that work just fine,…

I have to agree with you on "birds without flight". Google does manage to infer "flightless" from "without flight".

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#422

Post by l0b0 » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

"shirt -stripes" seems to work on google.com at least, even though they and others like DDG have been getting really bad at ignoring "-foo" terms recently.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#423

Post by eitland » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

ipsum2 wrote: post #333

floatingatoll wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 slac…

I disagree with your first point but agree with your second. Google obsoleted most webrings/directories because page rank was a better way of calculating a websites popularity. Then, websites figured out how to game page rank, and its been a gradual decline ever since.

HN keeps mentioning dark SEO and companies gaming the ranking.

That might explain a lot but I don't think so.

Just look to how they are messing up simple searches because of basic lack of quality controls:

- Why doesn't doublequotes work anymore? Not because dark SEO vut because nobody cares.

- Same goes for the verbatim option.

- The last Android phone I liked was the Samsung SII, and last year I finally gave up and got the cheapest new iPhone I could get, an XR. My iPhone XR reliably does something my S3, S4, S7 Edge and at least one Samsung Note couldn't do: it just work as expected without unreasonable delays.

- Ads. They seem to be optimized to fleece advertisers for pay-per-views because a good number of the ads I've seen are ridiculous, especially given that I had reported those ads a number of times. I guess what certain customers that probably paid a lot for those impressions would say if they knew that I had specifically tried to opt out from those ads and weren't in the target group anyway.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#424

Post by knodi123 » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #420

Fun experiment on Google: - Shirt Without Stripes: shirts where the description contains both "without" and "stripes". Example: a shirt without collar, with stripes. - "Shirt Without Stripes": a mess, with and without stripes, suggesting an unusual search query. In fact, the linked article site is the first result in web search. - Stripeless shirt: sexy women in strap less shirts - "stripeless shirt": pictures of Inv…

> The reason was simply that that exact word was rarely used in other contexts

I had a similar problem when I was trying to convince a friend that homeopathy was a complete and utter fraud with absolutely no basis in reality. She was convinced that the internet's overwhelming consensus was that homeopathy was valuable and regular doctors were control-freaks who make things up when they don't know the answers.

To prove her point, she did an internet search for allopathic medicine and showed me how the majority of the results were negative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allopathic_medicine

Just a humorous anecdote, not trying to start any conversations about the relative value of different medical paradigms.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#425

Post by moultano » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

Ya'll might be interested in this paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.13528

> in particular, it shows clear insensitivity to the contextual impacts of negation.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#426

Post by joshspankit » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #417

joshspankit wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you have points, but they break down here: “Shirt -stripes” is unambiguous to a system, yet the first result on Amazon(.ca) is a striped shirt, and the 3rd is sweatpants.

As someone else said you don't know that's wrong for what Amazon are optimising. If they find people [with your background profile] who buy shirts are susceptible to buying sweatpants, they might also find that if the seed you with "sweatpants" as an idea up front that the repeated presentation of sweatpants in "people who bought X also bought Y" sections is more effective. That's the sort of thing I'd expect Amazon…

Tbh, I feel like the underpinning “problem” is that more and more these marketplaces are optimizing for what they want to sell, and seeming to ignore blatant requests.

I’m an odd one that I already know specifically what I want to buy before I search for it, but I’m certainly not the only one (and I think everyone has done that at least once).

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#427

Post by jjnoakes » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

shanecleveland wrote: post #301

jjnoakes wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are different though - shirts with patterns (hawaiian, tie-dyed, etc) are "shirts without stripes" but they are not "solid-colored shirts".

Point being that the more narrowly-defined search does not require Google or Amazon to infer any meaning beyond what the object of the search is actually defined as. A shirt lacking stripes would never be described or labeled as a "shirt without stripes." In the absence of that actual description, you are asking google to assume what you mean. I would just never expect that to work very well.

It seems quite doable to handle "shirt without stripes" in the following way:

1) Gather all items labeled as "shirts" (among other labels) 2) Filter out any labels that includes "stripes"

A shirt doesn't have to be labeled "shirt without stripes" for this to work. A shirt labeled "shirt with stripes" or "striped shirt" would not match, and lots of other shirts (solid shirts, shirts with prints, whatever) would match just fine.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#428

Post by jedberg » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

encom wrote: post #418

jedberg wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want to be disappointed, search for [doctor] and [nurse]. Unless things have really changed, [doctor] will be mostly white men and [nurse] will be mostly white and Filipino women. But don't blame the AI. The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given. And in this case the data is the entirety of human knowledge that Google knows about. So really you can't…

What bias? Who is biased? Quick duckduckgoing indicates there are far more male than female doctors in the US. So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search. If you want a photo of a specifically gendered doctor, it's not hard to specify. Not really seeing a problem here.

> What bias? Who is biased?

I would contend that society is biased. There is no evidence that says men are better doctors than women, and in fact what little this has been studied says that women make better doctors than men (and is reflected in the more recent med school graduation classes which are majority women).

So it's a question of what you are asking for when you search for [doctor]. Are you asking for a statistical sampling or are you asking for a set of exemplars?

> So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search.

And that's exactly it. The AI has no morality. It's doing exactly what it should, and is amplifying our existing biases.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#429

Post by snowwrestler » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #390

bartread wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't quite believe your comment when I read it so I did a Google image search for "person" and the results weren't a lot better than you'd suggested. Mostly white men, a few white women, a very few black women, a handful of Asians, and multiple instances of Terry Crews. The net result of that Google search, combined with the "Shirt Without Stripes" repo, leaves me even more unimpressed with the capabilities of…

If you really want to be disappointed, search for [doctor] and [nurse]. Unless things have really changed, [doctor] will be mostly white men and [nurse] will be mostly white and Filipino women. But don't blame the AI. The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given. And in this case the data is the entirety of human knowledge that Google knows about. So really you can't…

Honestly, I don't think morality is the issue here; it is objectively inaccurate to show only white men for the search string "doctor" when not all doctors in the U.S. are white men, and most doctors in the world are not white men. This would be like showing only canoes if someone searched "boat"--we would rightly consider that an error to be corrected.

IMO, wrapping it in a concept like "morality" because the pictures have people in them just serves to excuse the problem and obscure its (otherwise obvious) solution.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#430

Post by larl » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

animalCrax0rz wrote: post #411

alberth wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The # 1 google result for “Shirt without stripes” is this very own HN post https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Shirt+without+Stripes%22&

Google is in the business of producing quick results to sell ads while keeping the cost low. If anyone does better, they will likely do it using a costlier algorithm, and if there is more margin in reselling tangible products than ads then Amazon is incentivized to use costlier algorithms that are more accurate. But I think the margin in both cases does not justify the use of algorithms that may be more accurate in s…

animalCrax0rx is in the business of producing quick pithy posts to earn more karma while keeping understanding low and making claims that are not evidence based...

See how that works? That's not really what's going on. Sure, G. is incentivized to include pages quickly, but they are also incentivized to produce them accurately, and as the above poster indicates, this is quite a hard problem to solve generally.

A is also incentivized to sell items.

In many cases different algorithms will lead to quantifiably different results. The algorithm changes that work better for the measurement set will be kept and those changes which dont will be discarded. And both A and G do that within different constraints.