| Searching "men without pants" versus "men with pants" gives much better results. This is a case where, while it makes sense to say the sentence, it's not a common use of language, and at the end of the day, the search engine will find what's written down, it's not a natural language processor yet (despite any marketing). Shirt stores don't advertise "Shirts without stripes - 20% off", they describe them as "Solid shirts" or "Plain shirts". Men's fashion blogs talk about picking "solid shirts" or "plain shirts" for a particular look. If I walked into a clothing store and asked for "shirts without stripes", the sales person would most likely laugh and say "er, you mean you want plain shirts?". Plain shirts/solid shorts are the most common way to refer to these, and people seem to be searching this way: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=solid%20... Regarding moving towards natural language processing - the "without" part is not as important as knowing the context. My kids will ask me to get from the bakery things like "the round bread with a hole and seeds", which I know means "sesame bagel", or "the sticky bread", which means "cinnamon twists" - which I understand because I know the context. Sometimes they say "I want the red thingy", and I need to ask a bunch of questions to eventually get at what they want (sometimes it's a red sweater, sometimes it's cranberry juice). Unless Google starts asking questions back, I don't think there is any way it can give you what you want right away. |
Searching "pants" only shows me "trousers", that's a big fail for Google IMO, I'm accessing google.co.uk.