"The AI works in mysterious ways. Trust it."It's rather surprising how often almost all complex systems theories be it AI, cosmology or economics have an aspects where even the theorists are resorting "to because it is".
Sometimes those statements are based on measured data but it's not always easy or possible to do so accurately for highly interconnected system or worse system where you have actors reacting to theoretical model in a way that changes how the system behaves.
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".