a threadbare cardigan

[jacdac]

Miss Quinney came to the door wearing a threadbare knitted cardigan, faded corduroys and a bobble hat, and declared that she was far too busy to talk to them.
Source: Killer on the Fens by Joy Ellis

When I googled for images for “threadbare cardigan”, the browser threw out images of cardigans that there is nothing threadbare about them. Most photos are footnoted with the word threadbare. Does threadbare means anything other than thin from overuse?

Thank you.

 

[dojibear]

Does threadbare means anything other than thin from overuse?

That's a good description of the word.

 

[lingobingo]

If you google threadbare on its own, then you get some relevant pictures.

 

[Egmont]

Image searches are not intelligent, though they often return useful results. When you search for images, the search engine uses the words that appear near an image on the Web page in its selection process. If the image has what Web designers call a <figcaption> or an alt attribute (a brief description for people, such as the visually impaired or those using a text-only browser, who do not see the image), those take priority, but the text is still used to supplement them. It will return images of cardigans that appear near the word "threadbare." The search engine has no way to know if the word refers to that image or to something else.

 

[Hildy1]

In the images that I find on Google, "Threadbare" seems to be the name of a company, not a description of the cardigans.