It's representative of a real pattern in queries, albeit maybe not the most common one. You'd most likely see this sort of query as a followup. The user types

It's representative of a real pattern in queries, albeit maybe not the most common one. You'd most likely see this sort of query as a followup. The user types in [shirts], gets a bunch of results, some with stripes and some without, and wants to only see the results without. So they modify their query from [shirts] to [shirts without stripes]. And since most search applications are basically just finding you the results with the most keyword matches, with a little bit of extra magic thrown in, the above is basically what you see. These queries are basically the equivalent of optical illusions in cognitive psychology when studying the visual system -- seeing how the systems break tells you a lot about how they work. Have you ever seen shirt dresses in your dress shirt queries, or vice versa? The search application isn't caring enough about bigrams and compound words. Have you ever seen bowls in your bowling queries or fish in your fishing queries? The search application is over-stemming. Natural language search is a real pain on any general purpose search application, particularly ones that have to deal with titles. The obvious simple fix to this query is to rewrite [x without y] to [x -y], but then when someone goes to search for [a day without rain] or [a year without summer], you are going to totally break those queries.