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While I'm sure this is A Hard Problem to solve by NLP I for whatever reason was under the impression that this is trivial to special-case.

As in, "X without Y" sounds like a common enough use case to have it's own little parser branch in places as big as Google or Amazon

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I mean, if I google the phrase "shirts -stripes" and click the Images tab I see mainly shirts without stripes.

So it's essentially the same input, and essentially the same expected output, but there must be quite a knot between understanding the word "without" and literally just using the - operator.

Right, but the - operator requires prior knowledge that the search engine understands boolean operators and that a -b is an alias of "listings with a on their text that don't have b in their text too" whereas "a without b" is inmediately recognizable by whoever is writing the search as "I want something of kind A without property B"

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