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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#91

Post by sonofgod »

jcims wrote: post #61
leephillips wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My first assumption is [shirts -stripes]

Of the first ten hits: Amazon: 7/10 aren't shirts (but all are stripeless) Google: All shirts, one is checked Bing: All shirts, all contain stripes in description.

Not exactly glowing for Amazon, clearly unsupported by Bing.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#92

Post by shanecleveland »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #71

Weirdly, searching for 'shirt no stripes' on Google returned this web page at top of the organic results. So at some point, searching for a shirt online will involve this conversation. Even more confusing. (Although I expect my filter bubble will play a part in that)

because google does understand that no and without are interchangeable. But, understandably, it does not correlate "shirt without stripes" as being the same thing as "solid-colored shirts." Why, because no one advertises or describes a solid-colored shirt as a shirt without stripes and no one searches that way. It's an irrelevant point, in my opinion.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#93

Post by noughtme »

noughtme wrote: post #14

Probably not surprising that most people don’t know, but negative keyword search works on all these platforms: shirt -stripes

it actually does work though. keywords will need to be generated whether manually, from the manufacturer, or from image analysis.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#94

Post by NullPrefix »

oliveshell wrote: post #25
derekp7 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be really nice if the search engines would automatically apply the "-" when it sees the work "without".

I’m not so sure. What about a search query for “Doctors without Borders“ or “Men Without Hats“? Surely interpreting “without“ as the negative operator would ruin those searches.

Minus before word already ruins search queries for terms that start with a dash.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#95

Post by montroser »

holdenc137 wrote: post #35

wake me up when I can google "Anything but crocodiles"

You're joking, but perhaps you're right. It's unnatural to search in the negative -- "solid shirt" or something like that would be more likely from a human with that actual intent.

This just suggests to me that real humans haven't issued that type of search query enough for the AI to know what to do with it. Which wouldn't be so big of a problem.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#96

Post by bityard »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #8

I think that this is actually really encouraging in showing that we still have a ways to go in improving search engines. A lot of people treat search engines as a solved problem, at least for non-question answering aspects.

Google has gotten significantly _less_ useful for finding technical information over the last decade or so. It used to be the case that when searching for some tech-related item (say, how to use functions in bash), the results would take you to someone's personal website or a wiki. Ostensibly, the more people linked to it and the more people clicked on it in the results, the better it ranked for that query and similar queries.

Today, entering in any tech-related query at all takes you to StackOverflow, end of story. Not only are SO answers quite often outdated (or even terrible advice in general), most of the time I'm not looking for a "here's how you do X", I'm looking for background information on a topic.

Most non-tech queries I put into google are even _more_ useless as the results tend to fall into these categories:

  * Wikipedia (okay for _very_ general things, useless for domain-specific knowledge)
  * SEO-enhanced blogspam, (a.k.a. "8 Weird Ways to Earn Millions Through Gaming The System!")
  * Tweets on twitter (!)
The dev/tech industry desperately needs a search engine that somehow prioritizes _quality_ content, not one-off answers, blogspam, and tweets.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#98

Post by enumjorge »

Ugohcet wrote: post #37
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?

I would prefer results containing words "shirt", "stripes" and "without". I don't want search engines to freely interpret my query and guess what I probably wanted to see while burying exact results in hundreds of pages of useless garbage.

I think it depends on the application. If I’m searching for products in a store I do want “shirts without stripes” to give me shirts without stripes. I have a hard time thinking of a case when including results with the word “without” would be useful when it comes to online shopping.

When I’m looking up information, like an article, especially technical information, then yes I want the search engine to do as little interpreting as possible. That’s because any interpretation rules it uses won’t always be relevant so I’d rather have more control.

But for Amazon? I don’t see how someone can see the average user typing “shirts without stripes” and getting almost nothing but shirts with stripes, and going “yup, works as expected”.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#99

Post by nardi »

leephillips wrote: post #87
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #74

https://www.google.com/search?q=plain+shirt https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plain+shirt on edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-stripes

So the - is working, contrary to the claims of several people here. The bottom line is that it is super easy to get results with shirts that don't have stripes, if you don't expect your search engine to understand English (which it would be wildly unrealistic to expect, and, besides, is not what you want).

So the - is working, contrary to the claims of several people here.

I wouldn't say so. For the five images at the top of my search results, 3 of the 5 are striped, and 1 is plaid.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#100

Post by chrisan »

leephillips wrote: post #87
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #74

https://www.google.com/search?q=plain+shirt https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plain+shirt on edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-stripes

So the - is working, contrary to the claims of several people here. The bottom line is that it is super easy to get results with shirts that don't have stripes, if you don't expect your search engine to understand English (which it would be wildly unrealistic to expect, and, besides, is not what you want).

Man that - operator is one of the first things I learned to help filter results.

These days either my searches have become better or their interpretation/context has as I rarely have to use that anymore

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