https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Shirt+without+Stripes%22&
If you argue this is bad behavior: Maybe we need a web query which really only takes the query literally. Putting the query in quotes will not quite have this effect for Google. Maybe some other syntax?
In this very specific case I don't buy it. Sure, it probably applies for other queries, but if you approach a salesperson and ask him for "shirts without stripes" it's pretty clear what you want, and he wont bring you any piece with stripes on it.
The only difference is that those are all physical properties of a shirt while stripes is a type of pattern.
shirt without buttons - preety much fail.
shirt without red button - as already expected, shirts with red buttons
* tie without paisley * tie not paisley * non-paisley ties * ties that aren't paisley * ties other than paisley
You guessed it, in each case, at least half of the results are paisley ties. The only way to actually get what you want -- the set described by X, minus the set described by Y -- is to use the exclusion operator in the search, "ties -paisley".
This is great, and makes intuitive sense to somebody with multiple computer science degrees. But not only is it hard to explain to an outsider, it's actually quite hard to get them to think in a way that accommodates this capability, that is, in terms of set theory.
I have the same reservations about Google as anyone, but rewriting history is never the right move. Moving beyond text matching was what made search truly useful.
> Moving beyond text matching was
> what made search truly useful.
What I don't like is to search for the band "Chrisma" and get results for "fruitcake sale!" because Google corrected my spelling to "Christmas", decided to look for related concepts, and then boost whichever result is the most mercantile.
Yes, they have. Read what I said again, I don't dispute this. What Google does now is an improvement over text matchers. I never claimed that what they do now is better than Google circa 2000 (though I don't care to register an opinion either way on that).
Whatever they've done since, their product remains better than text matchers. Mercantile search is better than terrible search.
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.
Pointing out the obvious: Google is an advertising company. If the cost of producing an accurate result outweighs the advertising income on a given term, there is no incentive for Google to produce better results.
Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads. But unless you consistently give the best results for all queries, people will go whenever does. It's worth investing strongly in all queries, not just highly monetizable ones.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
I was about to say there are no such queries but then I remembered having to type a captcha for seemingly automated queries. The captcha page has no results on it obviously. This is because automated queries do not produce advertising revenue. You have to buy them.
I've typed an insane number of queries since the beginning. A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers and I was pretty sure google delivered all of it. The tiny communities that came with the supper niche topics rarely produced a link I didn't already find. If they did it was new and I didn't google for a while.
Today google feels like it is a pre-ordered list from which it removes the least matching articles. Only if the match is truly shit will it be moved slightly down the page. The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celeberties who only have the first or the last name.
People wont go, it has to get much worse before they do.
edit:
With humans an pets a good slap over the head or a firm NO! will usually do the trick.
There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads. Trying some searches off the top of my head that I expected wouldn't have ads, I don't get any ads on [cabbage], [who is the president], [3+5], or [why is the sky blue]. On the other hand, if I search for a highly commercial query like [mesothelioma] the first four results are ads.
> A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers
My model of what happened is that SEO got a lot better. When Google first came out it was amazing because Page Rank was able to identify implicit ranking information in pages. Once it's valuable to have lots of backlinks, though, this gets heavily gamed. Staying ahead of efforts to game the algorithm is really hard, and I think a lot of times people's experience of a better search engine comes from a time when SEO was much less sophisticated.
> The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celebrities who only have the first or the last name.
This hasn't been my experience, so I tried an image search for [tom cruise], curious if I would get other Toms. The first 45 responses were all of the celebrity, and image 46 was of Glen Powell in https://helenair.com/people/tom-cruise-helps-glen-powell-lea... which is a different kind of mistake. Do you remember what query you were seeing this on?
I believe what he means is that searching for first name + last name of someone who isn’t a celebrity gets you celebrities who match either the first name or last name.
Searching for Tim Neeson gets you a wall of photos of Liam Neeson: https://www.google.com/search?q=tim+neeson&tbm=isch
Searching for Tim Cruise blankets you with pictures of Tom Cruise, but it at least says “Showing results for tom cruise“ so you know it did an autocorrect. When I tried other first names + Cruise, the effect is less pronounced than with the Neeson example. Maybe it’s because cruise is a more common name as well as an English word.
You don't have to bother creating anything new unless you have something to sell and are willing to invest (big).
Facebook is actually a pretty pathetic implementation where we can still find content created by normal people. If people made traditional websites in stead of facebook groups and facebook pages NO ONE would be able to find it.
We've witnessed the great obliteration of what was once a nice place and now we have to hear google was not to blame?? The death by a thousand cuts is actually well documented.
We tell you what your site must look like or we'll gut it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin Google Penguin is a codename[1] for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines[2]
There, this is what the entire internet must look like. We went from indexing to engineering here.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
rel="ugc"
If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you might remove this attribute from links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time. Read more about avoiding comment spam.
Before this those elaborately contributing got actual credit for it. Do you think you got a choice in it? Google clearly demands you ban credit for comments. OR ELSE!
rel="nofollow"
Woah association! How did we go from linking-to to association? It was important enough for readers but be careful to hide it from google. Such little unimportant websites simply shouldn't exist in our index. We command you to help keep our index clean of such filth!
Then the magical: We wont actually tell you what is wrong with your website! Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 39 "Don't tell customers more than they need to know." Get a budget and hire someone to do SEO. Deal with it, we don't care. No, you don't have any feedback.
Queries without ads do produce revenue. They are an essential part of the formula.
Think of people standing around in bars. We cant argue that just standing there doesn't produce revenue.
The flowers on the table in a restaurant produce revenue.
Free parking produces revenue.
If queries without adds didn't produce revenue they wouldn't exist. More often enough it doesn't even take an extra query, the adds will sit behind the links.
No, it would predict that a query that has no advertising income will poor results. You can determine on your own whether that is the case.
But it isn't necessary to formalize any of it. At the current level of sophistication, our informal common ground of words like "understanding" suffice for a discussion. It's obvious Google Translate doesn't resemble human language processing.
Yes, the English grammatical rules make it unambiguous where it belongs. This is solvable.
Seems like a matter for logical inference. At which point it becomes fairly easy to find shirts made from material where that materials pattern is not stripes.
But yes, no AI I have seen works reliably on even basic queries like this.
Most likely, common sense reasoning will be required to get full natural language processing, since human communication relies extremely often on such reasoning. But building a knowledge base of common sense facts will be one of the hardest challenges ever attempted in machine learning/artificial intelligence.
Couldn't you just parse the sentence into a dependency tree and look at the relationships to figure that out? CoreNLP got both of your examples right (try it at http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/corenlp/process, can't link the result directly).
To be useful, Google must solve natural language problems. You can't solve natural language problems by using formal language in sine bits of the problem, at least not until we have a full Chomsky-style understanding of the whole of human language.
Well, one could argue, that it belongs exactly where anyone entering the query put it. Before "stripes".
The problem is often, that search engines try to be too clever, while not offering any kind of switch "exactly those words in this order" and that is just a bad user interface.
If it just disregards the word without, well, that's pretty bad.
I will not be surprised millions of dollars are being lost because of this substandard query result per year.
“Shirt -stripes” is unambiguous to a system, yet the first result on Amazon(.ca) is a striped shirt, and the 3rd is sweatpants.
That's the sort of thing I'd expect Amazon to be doing?
“Yes, I would like an unstriped dress shirt please”
“How about this striped shirt?”
“No thank you, I would like an unstriped dress shirt please”
“I have some lovely jogging pants”
“Ok, I need to be clear here, I would like a dress shirt that has no stripes”
“Can I interest you in a white undershirt? People who buy dress shirts usually buy undershirts”
....
T: I think pink would look good on you, and it's very fashionable right now.
You: Just bring me some yellow shirts to try.
T: Oh, I got these, and brought this pink one anyway; try it!
But, of course Google isn't making fashion suggestions. But then, ... the tailor might also be just trying to shift excess stock or be on a bonus for selling that particular high-cost shirt.
They can certainly also bring some stock to shift, or offer suggestions while I’m trying something on, but if they aren’t listening when I make a direct request or when I clearly say no, then they aren’t really there for me, their customer.
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).
I mean, context is key, right? You're on Amazon and your first search term is "shirts". Unless their is a band called "shirts without stripes", the user wants shirts. The rest of the query is probably some filter of that product. You know shirts sometimes have stripes. It's not a one-size-fits-all algorithm, but it's simple enough that the user should end up with the results they wanted.
> "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things.
Why is it not as simple "no belongs to the word it precedes" ? like unary operator, ! (not), in typical computer languages.
- no textbook evidence of cancer
Statements have structure, parsing them with simple rules like this is akin to parsing C++ with regular expressions.
You'd also have quite a bit of fun trying to parse the phrase "no means no" or other usages where "no" is being used as a noun... And for bonus points, folks talk to search engines in broken english all the time so "shirts no single striped" is a totally reasonable query to submit to a server and expect to be parse-able.
I think the basic issue is that people just don't respect machines and want to minimize the amount of effort spend on communicating with them - I don't say "Alexa please bring up songs by Death Grips if you don't mind" I shout "Alexa! Play! Death Grips!" and then yell at it when it misunderstands.
Does she want ice cream? Answer: No, she doesn't. I added a not, so she's reversing the answer as Japanese people do.
The number of times I've been dumbstruck by this is larger than I'd like to admit, and I'm a coder.
Q: "Do you mind if I sit here?"
A1: "Not at all!"
A2: "Sure!"
Both are valid answers and mean the same thing, the person asking is welcome to sit there. This has always amused me.
"Not at all" == "I do Not [object to you sitting here] at all"
A3: “Sure I do, last time you sat next to me you wouldn’t shut up.”
There have been some lengthy discussions on HN about vertical search and how Google doesn't always buy up a small company; they litigate.
I'd be curious to see how many sentences with attribution problems actually have other structural issues. If I want to write clearly and without ambiguity, I rewrite sentences that have these problems. Why wouldn't I do the same for search queries?
The bad results are because they're not positively indexing the absense of the feature by deeply analyzing the images or products beyond the descriptions. "Shirt with stripes" yields almost exclusively striped shirts. Exclude those results from all "shirts" and there are still a lot of striped shirts that the search algorithm doesn't know enough to exclude.
There is no ambiguity in "not stripes", you can't invert it and write it in the positive form of what you want; the neatest way to describe the category of what you want to browse is "things which are not stripey".
Particular personal bugbear is car websites where you can filter in "petrol engine" or "diesel engine", but there is no support for negative filtering, so you can't choose "not LPG". In so many search-and-filter options you can't exclude your dealbreakers, and it's much more likely that I have a single dealbreaker which rejects a choice overriding all other considerations, than that I have a single dealmaker which makes a choice overriding all else.
What do you call a skyscraper like that if you want to refer to it? They exist, but you can't find them using that search term on Google.
https://www.google.com/search?q=windowless+skyscraper&tbm=is...
https://www.emporis.com/buildings/119453/seattle-tower-seatt...
Windowless is a superset of glassless.
"non-glass skyscraper":
1. No glass used in the exterior construction at all -> implying no windows
2. No glass used in the exterior construction at all -> implying the windows are made out of something other than glass
3. A skyscraper in which glass is not a prominent architectural feature, but the building does contain features like windows and doors that contain glass. (This comment)
That's the full glass buildings returned in your windowless query.
Ok, so imagine one online retailer follows your advice and expect the users to write clear and unambiguous queries, while another retailer puts extra effort into attribution.
Which one will make more money?
A sales gimmick furniture store would use in the past was to offer customers a free gallon on ice cream for visiting the store. The value was to the store offering the promotion, as shoppers would be drawn to the "free" gift, but on receiving the ice cream -- too much to eat directly. -- would then have to go home to put the dessert in the freezer. And have less time to comparison shop at competing merchant's stores. Given limited shopping time (usually a weekend activity), this is an effective resource exhaustion attack.
Similar tricks to tie up time, patience, or cognitive reserve are common in sales. For a dominant vendor, tweaking the hassle factor of a site so long as defection rates are low could well be a net positive, if it makes the likelihood of a visitor going to other sites lower.
Still I insist that business serving up more relevant search results for loosely phrased queries will make more money than the one relying on the user to formulate perfect queries.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
See Scott Adams, "Confusopoly" (2011): https://www.scottadamssays.com/2011/12/07/online-confusopoly...
I've touched on this: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/243in1/privacy...
The antipattern is sufficiently widely adopted that I've been. looking for possible dark-pattern justifications.
I'm not sure trying to confuse people about whether a shirt has stripes on it would make as much sense. The purchaser seems likely to give up on picking an ideal shirt and just go with the cheapest result.
Both though have the same essence: a manifestly confusing and annoying interface may be serving the merchant's interests.
See also Ling's Cars, possibly explaining awful Web design:
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/7tojtidef_l4r_sdbringw (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16921212)
That’s the best I can do, sorry.
I think you'd struggle to find anywhere Google claims to "understand everything", making your assertion a strawman.
Literally in the article you're quoting from Google:
> But you’ll still stump Google from time to time. Even with BERT, we don’t always get it right. If you search for “what state is south of Nebraska,” BERT’s best guess is a community called “South Nebraska.” (If you've got a feeling it's not in Kansas, you're right.)
"So that’s a lot of technical details, but what does it all mean for you? Well, by applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.
"Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.
...
"No matter what you’re looking for, or what language you speak, we hope you’re able to let go of some of your keyword-ese and search in a way that feels natural for you. But you’ll still stump Google from time to time. Even with BERT, we don’t always get it right. If you search for “what state is south of Nebraska,” BERT’s best guess is a community called “South Nebraska.” (If you've got a feeling it's not in Kansas, you're right.)
"Language understanding remains an ongoing challenge, and it keeps us motivated to continue to improve Search. We’re always getting better and working to find the meaning in-- and most helpful information for-- every query you send our way."
"The AI works in mysterious ways. Trust it."It's rather surprising how often almost all complex systems theories be it AI, cosmology or economics have an aspects where even the theorists are resorting "to because it is".
Sometimes those statements are based on measured data but it's not always easy or possible to do so accurately for highly interconnected system or worse system where you have actors reacting to theoretical model in a way that changes how the system behaves.
I don't have proof, but I strongly believe that a search algorithm that returns what a customer is actually searching for will drive more sales. I suppose it's possible that with time, consistently bad results will beat a customer into submission and drive more sales of stuff the customer doesn't want. But I don't believe that's true, and this would only be the case if the customer accepts that the thing they want doesn't exist. If the customer is pretty sure that solid color shirts exist, they'll just shop elsewhere until they find it.
edit: fixed typo born -> porn
Presumably this would be after the algo devalued people who clicked on "Next Page" until they came to a page that had stripeless shirts on it, or who, after the search, only ever clicked on stripeless shirts. "Deeds not words," dontchaknow.
Which is not the case: searching for "plain shirts" do not give similar results than searching for "shirts without stripes".
> sometimes still don’t quite get it right,
> Even with BERT, we don’t always get it right.
And nothing in the blog is about image search.
Zooming out, the language field breaks into several subfields:
- A large group of Chomsky followers in academia are all about logical rules but very little in the way of algorithmic applicability, or even interest in such.
- A large and well-funded group of ML practitioners, with a lot of algorithmic applicability, but arguably very shallow model of the language fails in cases like attribution. Neural networks might yet show improvement, but apparently didn't in this case.
- A small and poorly funded group of "comp ling", attempting to create formalisms (e.g. HPSG) that are still machine-verifiable, and even generative. My girlfriends is doing PhD in this area, in particular dealing with modeling WH questions, so I get some glimpse into it; it's a pity the field is not seeing more interest (and funding).