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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I expect to get results that contain the keywords "shirt", "stripes", and "without", but perhaps with the last term ignored. Why, what would you expect? Would you search for "shirts that don't have stripes"? Or "shirts lacking stripes"?

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>Why, what would you expect?

I'd expect to see some of the much touted "search intelligence", NLP, term inference, vector term analysis, and AI in action...

It sounds like you expect the search engines to understand natural language, because your expectations are influenced by what is "touted". Do you think that's a realistic expectation?

Google started doing that with its regular search queries several years ago. There are thousands of complains on HN about how it's almost impossible now to find anything without "quoting" "every" "word" "of" "your" "query".

If it's going to do that, it should do it right. If not, then I think it's fair to criticize it for not getting the search query correct.

This is the only interface you really get into the amazon catalog. What if you really are looking for shirts that don't have stripes? How would you formulate the query?

Like Google, Amazon is supposed to support the - operator, but, also like Google, it's not clear whether it does anything at the moment. As others here have suggested, maybe "solid shirts"?

My first assumption is [shirts -stripes]

Of the first ten hits: Amazon: 7/10 aren't shirts (but all are stripeless) Google: All shirts, one is checked Bing: All shirts, all contain stripes in description.

Not exactly glowing for Amazon, clearly unsupported by Bing.

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