[neur4lnet]

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.

[tazjin]

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.

[tablespoon]

>> 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.

[tazjin]

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

[tablespoon]

>> 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.

[geon]

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?