shirt -stripes
It would show pictures of shirts in pages that don't mention the word "stripes", whether the shirts have stripes on them or not.
In other words, it has little to do with what the article wants to show...
I've run into so many variations of this. You can search for something only to have the recommendation/related results embedded on whatever page to throw off your results one way or another.
I genuinely think that whatever standard HTML/XTHML is at ought to have, either as an attribute or a semantic tag, some kind of "related" or "recommended" ability to set that content apart. My cynical thought is that even if it were adopted, it would probably get abused in some fashion.
What about a search query for “Doctors without Borders“ or “Men Without Hats“?
Surely interpreting “without“ as the negative operator would ruin those searches.
Though I somewhat agree, I don't think that an average user even knows about existence of search operators in the first place, let alone being aware of this specific one and when to use it.
The author's intent exceeds both the capabilities and intended use case of search engines.
The query "shirts without stripes" if interpreted by human would require any search system to not only analyse the keywords and tags (of the products/images), but also the content, which is an infeasible task given its dynamic nature.
So the author wants: select all shirts where content analysis of returned images yields no stripes.
This is a context-sensitive image/product search based on arbitrary, dynamically created criteria and shows that user isn't aware of what the search functionality does as opposed to exposing weak "AI". [edit]To clarify: you cannot add all possible keywords/criteria in advance[/edit]
