The '-' operator stopped working for me with Google a while back. Not sure why, it's fairly frustrating.

They want to always return results even when they don't have any. So they will remove some of your query. This last week Google even returned months old results when I asked for the last 24 hours. It's so frustrating. I wish the Google team that decided this nonsense have to migrate Python 2 to Python 3 projects until they retire.

Yeah that works, but it's not the point. The author isn't saying there's no way to search for shirts that don't have stripes. They're saying search engines still don't understand how to find shirts without stripes in the same way humans do.

You can also do "plain shirt", but the repo is making a message about the smartness of our search engines.

Still includes some shirts with stripes, since the search is now just for shirts that don't explicitly mention stripes.

And parent is saying it isn't working. (It doesn't work for me either.)

That's not right, because that would not include pages that have the text "shirt without stripes" on them.

doesn't works