I think you'd struggle to find anywhere Google claims to "understand everything", making your assertion a strawman.
Literally in the article you're quoting from Google:
> But you’ll still stump Google from time to time. Even with BERT, we don’t always get it right. If you search for “what state is south of Nebraska,” BERT’s best guess is a community called “South Nebraska.” (If you've got a feeling it's not in Kansas, you're right.)
"So that’s a lot of technical details, but what does it all mean for you? Well, by applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.
"Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.
...
"No matter what you’re looking for, or what language you speak, we hope you’re able to let go of some of your keyword-ese and search in a way that feels natural for you. But you’ll still stump Google from time to time. Even with BERT, we don’t always get it right. If you search for “what state is south of Nebraska,” BERT’s best guess is a community called “South Nebraska.” (If you've got a feeling it's not in Kansas, you're right.)
"Language understanding remains an ongoing challenge, and it keeps us motivated to continue to improve Search. We’re always getting better and working to find the meaning in-- and most helpful information for-- every query you send our way."
"The AI works in mysterious ways. Trust it."I don't have proof, but I strongly believe that a search algorithm that returns what a customer is actually searching for will drive more sales. I suppose it's possible that with time, consistently bad results will beat a customer into submission and drive more sales of stuff the customer doesn't want. But I don't believe that's true, and this would only be the case if the customer accepts that the thing they want doesn't exist. If the customer is pretty sure that solid color shirts exist, they'll just shop elsewhere until they find it.
edit: fixed typo born -> porn
Presumably this would be after the algo devalued people who clicked on "Next Page" until they came to a page that had stripeless shirts on it, or who, after the search, only ever clicked on stripeless shirts. "Deeds not words," dontchaknow.
Which is not the case: searching for "plain shirts" do not give similar results than searching for "shirts without stripes".
> sometimes still don’t quite get it right,
> Even with BERT, we don’t always get it right.
And nothing in the blog is about image search.