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.