"Shirt without stripes" may (or may not) be an unusual word choice to enter into a search engine, but it's definitely one that a child would understand.

Additionally, "shirt without stripes" is not the same as "solid color shirt"; as an example, take a look at:

https://www.google.com/search?q=tie+dye+shirt

Quite so. "Shirt without stripes" can include shirts in plenty of patterns other than solid colours (paisley, polka dot, checked, battenberg, floral print, etc.).

Yes, that exact sequence of words isn't particularly common. And yet a child, even if they have hey have never been exposed to it, has no problem understanding what it means.

Whereas all these services seem to be processing the input in such a superficial way that they give the searcher results that aren't just inaccurate but are the opposite of what was asked for.

> "shirt without stripes" is an unusual word choice

Lol what? These are words a toddler would understand.

>I disagree, who says "shirt without stripes"? That's an unusual word choice, not one that our ML algorithms would be optimized for.

If your "ML algorithm" doesn't understand straightforward language, how is it any better than a couple if-then statements?

Beyond that, I'm unsure how you think "<something> without <something>" is at all unusual or difficult to decipher.

Every human understands that phrase and yet the AI doesn't. That's the gap that has to be fixed.

You have to realize that search is not AI. It's pattern matching. And the string "shirt without stripes" matches really good with "shirt with stripes". Levenshtein distance is 3.

If vendors would use the term "shirt without stripes" than it would match great, but they call it "plain shirt".

> You have to realize that search is not AI.

Google advertises using BERT natural language models

https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understa...

> ... but they call it "plain shirt".

Or polka dotted :)

I don't want to teach myself how to talk to a machine. I want the machine to understand what I am saying.

“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)

I searched "plain dress shirt" and similar terms on Amazon and Google, and they returned plenty of shirts with stripes and checkered patterns.

How am I supposed to explicitly search for a shirt without stripes, then?

Just searched same on google and first non-plain shirt was in the second hundred. Duckduckgo was similar. Considering that they classify images according to surrounding text, it seems like pretty good result.

I would go in a store and search there. Not everything has to be solved by tech and AI. This is a prime example of a problem that requires insane amount of work and yet provide absolutely no value to the world.

People still think we will have self driving cars "in two years" yet here we are talking about dumb shirts. AI winter is coming