That wouldn't show pictures of shirts without 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...

This sounds great, right? But consider the recommendation engines that are part of Amazon, Stack Overflow, whatever. You've just filtered out pages that have a shirt without stripes on it ... but have a striped shirt somewhere in a recommendation bar on the page.

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.

It would be really nice if the search engines would automatically apply the "-" when it sees the work "without".

I’m not so sure.

What about a search query for “Doctors without Borders“ or “Men Without Hats“?

Surely interpreting “without“ as the negative operator would ruin those searches.

What happens when someone asks you about one of those items? You consult your memory reserves, and you find that those are proper names of specific entities. So your brain returns those entities. Now there very well be a high school band called "Shirts without Stripes", you most likely would call up plain shirts or shirts with non-striped patterns. No reason that a search engine wouldn't follow the same rules (i.e., Google must have millions of entries for Doctors without Borders and Men without Hats).

IIRC if you use quotation marks in your search query, it would search for the exact match of that phrase without any search operators processed inside of it. So those scenarios you listed would still work fine.

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.

Minus before word already ruins search queries for terms that start with a dash.

it actually does work though. keywords will need to be generated whether manually, from the manufacturer, or from image analysis.

Search engines are indexing content based on [edit]STATIC [/edit] keywords, though.

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]