Shirt Without Stripes • Hacker News Board

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#61

Post by jcims » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #26

enumjorge wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. I expect to get results that contain the keywords "shirt", "stripes", and "without", but perhaps with the last term ignored. Why, what would you expect? Would you search for "shirts that don't have stripes"? Or "shirts lacking stripes"?

This is the only interface you really get into the amazon catalog. What if you really are looking for shirts that don't have stripes? How would you formulate the query?

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#62

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

Ugohcet wrote: post #47

coldtea wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why, what would you expect? I'd expect to see some of the much touted "search intelligence", NLP, term inference, vector term analysis, and AI in action...

Google started doing that with its regular search queries several years ago. There are thousands of complains on HN about how it's almost impossible now to find anything without "quoting" "every" "word" "of" "your" "query".

If it's going to do that, it should do it right. If not, then I think it's fair to criticize it for not getting the search query correct.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#63

Post by rbetts » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

This is also confusing what you search for vs. what the vendor thinks you will buy. Product catalog searches often intentionally return items outside your search parameters.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#64

Post by leephillips » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

1f60c wrote: post #46

leephillips wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the - operator is supposed to do. It's supposed to suppress pages containing the keyword after the -.

And parent is saying it isn't working. (It doesn't work for me either.)

That's why I said "supposed" to do. I'm not sure if it's working at the moment.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#65

Post by Justin_K » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

alexpapworth wrote: post #45

Justin_K wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go as far as saying "AI" is only as good as someone has taken the time to program the use case.

So, it's really just a series of if statements?

Not that but maybe someone can explain if the technology is "AI" why it still takes tens of thousands of hours to implement a project? Shouldn't we call it AI when the frameworks can be implemented with relative ease? My point is that the level of customization required to achieve AI, in my opinion, doesn't make it very intelligent.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#66

Post by scabarott » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

meritt wrote: 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.

Or maybe there's just not a lot of AI in their main search product (for whatever reason). They seem to be pretty good in other areas (Translate, Cloud speech-to-text, Alexa etc.)

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#67

Post by 0x00000000 » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

bentona wrote: 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.

The other day I found that googling something like “mesothelioma -lawyer” will exclude results with “lawyer” but all the ads will still be for lawyers and contain the word “lawyer”.

I guess because they leave it up to the advertiser to determine the negative match words and that seems to always have priority.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#68

Post by blondin » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

antman wrote: post #2

A good display of the current state of search engines.

the icab link from yesterday showed a screenshot of amazon when their categories listings were still meaningful and helpful. nowadays, it's just a pain.

i recently looked for dough scrapers. i wanted to see what's selling best and what's most rated. they are everywhere. in dessert & decoration, in utensils, in bakeware, and many other categories. i mean i get it...

it's not just search that's hard. categorization is also an issue here.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#69

Post by fluffything » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

alexpapworth wrote: post #45

Justin_K wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go as far as saying "AI" is only as good as someone has taken the time to program the use case.

So, it's really just a series of if statements?

Yes, each of which wraps a "Not Hotdog" app. Turns out that "Not Hotdog" is quite hard already.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#70

Post by leni536 » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

diegorbaquero wrote: post #18

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

stripes are not the only pattern besides solid color.