I don't think this particular problem is related to the language model. "[item] without [attribute]" is trivial to understand even without a sophisticated language model.

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.

Because there aren't two kinds of shirt, striped or solid coloured. You even acknowledge that by mentioning Hawai'ian shirts. You might want a small check shirt, a mostly plain shirt but not mind logos so not completely monocolour, a plaid shirt, a large check lumberjack style, spotted or dotted or diamond pattern, flowery pattern, you might not even know what the other available options are to search for them one by one - you just know that you don't want stripes.

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.

Is it that odd though? I'm not a native english speaker, but I would say "shirt without patterns", not solid. Or for example "without visible logo"

Consider the query, "non-glass skyscrapers", which suffers from the same problem.

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.

I'd call it windowless:

https://www.google.com/search?q=windowless+skyscraper&tbm=is...

You missed the Seattle Tower Building. It has windows, but very little in the way of visible glass.

https://www.emporis.com/buildings/119453/seattle-tower-seatt...

Windowless is a superset of glassless.

To be clear (for the benefit of anyone else who reads this), the windows in the Seattle Tower are made of glass, but the exterior of the building is not that modern all-glass-and-steel look[1]. This is a third interpretation of non-glass I hadn't thought of and it took me a minute to figure it out.

"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)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilshire_Grand_Center

It comes down to what is considered "windows". When the whole external material is glass, glass panes aren't just windows anymore.

That's the full glass buildings returned in your windowless query.

Yo seem to think that queries of this form are ambiguous, but they are not. Given the set of shirts, and that the subset of 'shirts with stripes' is well-defined (which you apparently accept, given that you seem to think that 'shirts with stripes' is an unambiguous query (which it is)), then its complement is well-defined; there is no 'Russell's Barber' paradox here, as there is no self-reference.

>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?

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?

Great question, but with potentially nonintuitive results.

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.

That's a fascinating story, thank you.

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.

I'd love to believe that myself. I absolutely hate ineffective & irrelevant search results.

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.

The original "confusopoly" link talked almost exclusively about pricing, and for good reason: pricing is based on numbers, which humans are bad at but computers are very good at, and every product in the catalog has a price, so it's easy to take the same tactic and apply it to all of the products.

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.

I thought I'd written on a more comparable gripe similar to the "shirt without stripes" problem in online commerce, the confusopoly item was the closest I could find readily. (Other is likely among my G+ take-out.)

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)