Google “Pepper”: When a Brand Becomes More Popular Than the Meaning of the Word | Hacker News Reader

Google “Pepper”: When a Brand Becomes More Popular Than the Meaning of the Word

seroundtable.com

22 pointsvincent_s39 comments

There's something fundamentally concerning with this response:

"Things like this can change over time, brands can become stronger than the original meaning of a word even."

The implication being that in that region, US, more people think of bras than condiments/fruit when they think of pepper. That Google is just reflecting the state of the world. That seems like bullshit to me.

Made worse by the fact that enough people use Google that the opposite is more likely to be true.

Google's search got gamed by Pepper SEO, the US is not suddenly more more interested in a underwear brand than the food.

I don't think it's "think more about" but "want to see that result for this query", those are slightly different things. Given that many people navigate the internet by typing the name of the site they want into Google, this doesn't even seem unlikely if "Pepper" is a popular online shop.

That said, in Russia Google shows some very shady looking "discount code" website called Pepper as the first result - which I'm pretty sure is not better known or more desired than the fruit.

Google does not in fact yield anything related to actual peppers before page 3 of the result, Yandex at least has the decency to spit out Wikipedia's disambiguation page for "Pepper" as one of the first results.

I think this is a problem with how services don't let you specify your intent very well, and try to "guess" everything for you.

You can think of this as a different shape of the problem of online translation tools: If a user enters an idiom to be translated into a translation app, are they interested in a literal translation (which e.g. a language learner might be), or a semantic translation (maybe even into an idiom in the target language)? You can make guesses about which one will be more popular, but you'll also definitely get it wrong much of the time if users can't specify their intent.

>> Google's search got gamed by Pepper SEO, the US is not suddenly more more interested in a underwear brand than the food.

> I don't think it's "think more about" but "want to see that result for this query", those are slightly different things.

That can be true, but I think it's the kind of explanation that has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to believed. Unless you can do that, I think the assumption when a brand overtakes the generic term should be it's due to a SEO gaming.

So Amazon may truly be a legitimately more popular search than the amazon (because it's an online store that's so popular it's arguably monopolistic), but Pepper (apparently a niche bra for "small-chested women") is almost certainly not legitimately more popular than pepper.

Intuitively I found it not that hard to believe that the number of people who just google "pepper" to find something about the fruit or spice is fairly small.

However, a Google Trends query[0] (limited to the USA) indicates that the growth in "pepper" queries is pretty constant (the bra brand apparently launched in 2017). That makes intentional SEO gaming more likely again.

[0]: https://tgsa.tazj.in/img/tazuploads/24/0

>> That can be true, but I think it's the kind of explanation that has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to believed. Unless you can do that, I think the assumption when a brand overtakes the generic term should be it's due to a SEO gaming.

> Intuitively I found it not that hard to believe that the number of people who just google "pepper" to find something about the fruit or spice is fairly small.

But that's not anywhere "proven beyond a reasonable doubt," rather it's the very low standard of "I can imagine it maybe being true." You provided good evidence for SEO gaming, but I don't think that was strictly necessary given where I think the burden of proof lies.

In general, I see a lot of thinking that takes "whatever a FAANG does" as an oracle for truth, so spends a lot of effort to justify their results as correct. I think that's wrong (at both the factual and moral levels), and also creates a tolerance for regression, so it should be disputed.

People don’t just google every word they think of. They google what they want to know more about. Is it so unlikely that more people want to know about a clothing brand than a vegetable?

This must be regional, because it certainly doesn't show that for me in the UK, top two results are the wikipedia articles for the vegetable (capsicum) and black pepper.

It's not even just a region thing, it's a more individual history based customisation.

Google quickly adapts based on things you search.

For example I know if I google some keywords right now I'll likely get information about a detail in a computer game I play even without specifying.

At other times when I'm more into other hobbies it would be more likely to show more general results.

Yep, I get Pepper[1], the robot from SoftBank as the first result. :D

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(robot)

My surname is Pepper and it didn't come up with me :D

You are not a doctor are you?

A sergeant, more likely.

... yes, I am actually.

Yea, we are pepper is on the second page for me.

I'm getting a ton of what appears to be malvertising fake sites recently in Google Search, hosted in what appears to be compromised government websites in emerging markets. Google Search isn't just adapting, something is broken about it.

> It's not even just a region thing, it's a more individual history based customisation.

Not in this case. There's absolutely nothing in my search history to say I'd be more interested in bras, but Pepper-the-bra-company is the first result when I search "pepper".

It's also the first result the Wayback Machine sees: https://web.archive.org/web/20220216050301/https://www.googl...

This is just Google having you profiled to like women's undergarments.

This is another reality of search results and digital entropy to reckon with. Across different search terms, this is a problem caused by targeted SEO as much as it is simply self-optimizing/biasing results and indirect consequence. Some time ago I went hunting on YouTube for 1980s synthesizer stock music, and not entirely surprising over 95% of the search results were modern "synthwave" tracks from the past few years, riding on the trend of labeling itself as "1980s". Because of the explosive popularity of the "synthwave" genre it was next to impossible to find what I really wanted. Just 6-7 years ago the search results were quite accurate.

This thread is exposing one of the dirty realities of modern SEO. Most of the time, SEO folks will measure their success based on having some way of determining their ranking for a given search query.

The problem is that in 2022, google personalizes (aka re-ranks) the SERPs on enough dimensions (device type, location, user, etc) that a single mapping of search query -> ranking fails to capture any of the nuance that google is applying to their user understanding. I'm not sure how or when the SEO space will actually reckon with this, or if they'll keep just pushing poor 'visibility' metrics that can't actually be reduced to a single dimension.

Google hasn't seemed to realize that until its able to literally read our minds, it will incorrectly guess the context of our search as often as not. As a result, we all have to suffer the tyranny of the masses: Whatever is going to appeal to the broadest possible audience will appear at the top of the search results.

Google of course wants to customize the results for us, but the only way it can really know our personal preferences is through unprecedented invasion of our privacy or haphazard guesses based on recent activity. [Insert the meme about YouTube suddenly suggesting a hundred videos about some random thing you happened to watch once.]

This technological ochlocracy is a black hole which sucks in every medium that survives on the mass market and especially those that rely on advertising dollars. Whatever is the most popular brings in the most money - so the History Channel goes from broadcasting historical biographies to 24/7 Pawn Stars and other reality TV crap. If a company hasn't found some profitable niche - e.g. Mercedes Benz or Gucci - then they will inevitably decline in quality as time goes by. In tech, this is always most apparent when the second or third generation leadership comes in and has lost touch with the original ideals and goals of the founders. They need to keep the revenues ever increasing, so they inevitably dilute the core values of their products in order to expand the market. This rarely turns out well.

So, I hope you enjoy scrolling through promoted links, movie summaries, video clips, shopping links, maps of local businesses and more before you get to the Wikipedia page you were hoping to find, because it's not changing any time soon.

In the end, search engines may prioritize this kind of content if they "detect" you may be the right target for those ads. Search engines balance the service vs the benefit, while companies try to position themselves as higher as they can.

I've been exploring alternatives, even self-hosting ones. Although it's complex due to the amount of pages out there.

It's probably because no one in Big Pepper is very good at SEO.

I'm disturbed by something else: when I do the search, my quite large desktop browser window shows all of two results.

1. Pepper | Better Fitting Bras for AA, A and B Cups

1a. Bras

1b. Shop All

1c. Fit Guide

1d. Starter Kit

2. Pepper - Wikipedia

2a. Black pepper - Wikipedia

Below those, there's "people also ask", of which only the first two are visible because Google spent the entire height of my window to display two results. But if you scroll down, there are two more suggested questions and three more results, interspersed with random garbage ("sample of image results for pepper" [none of them are bras]; "sample of youtube results for pepper"; "related searches"; "suggested searches"...)

The entire first page of results is just five results, and three of them are hidden.

I find this amusing because I was served a deviously effective Youtube ad from Pepper just two days ago. Unlike most ads, I watched the whole thing to the end. It seems like that's most people's experience. On the other hand, I'm not a female... though I did feel the urge to tell my intimate partner about it.

The ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkTrJ7b4gvM

I just see photos of pepper plants and seeds. I suspect this is a viral marketing campaign.

Yeah not the same here either, showing bell. Showing actual pepper, capsicum, & shelf pepper.

Guessing Google can just see your history looking at bras, and you’re being targeted ads.

I hadn't ever searched for bras, but Google got me dead to rights - I have B cups and finding bras is hard. AdWords is scary good I guess.

In Canada, I see an add for bras, wiki:Pepper (disambiguation), wiki:Black Pepper, and then a shopping site named pepper. I'm not mad about this.

Why would a company buying top billing in google be a surprise?

The brand is only more popular with Google, not with the rest of us.

The primary example is Amazon, where I needed to go to page three for anything related to the Amazon.

I expected to see Dr. Pepper :-) Never knew many people care to remember underwear brands.

SEO and its consequences...

Ah, the well known "apple effect" strikes again.

Linguistic colonialism

Thanks to this we can google programming languages by their names.

Except for Go.

googling “pepper” gives me results about black pepper, everything seems to work fine (Switzerland).

Doing it in Germany gives me, oddly enough, an infobox about the Foxconn robot and a series of related questions in German (e.g. "what can Pepper do?").

This is a Denver startup. go Fiona!!!

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