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Google “Pepper”: When a Brand Becomes More Popular Than the Meaning of the Word
- ls15 4y agoLinguistic colonialism
- qwerty456127 4y agoThanks to this we can google programming languages by their names.
- eptcyka 4y agoExcept for Go.
- matt3D 4y agoIt's probably because no one in Big Pepper is very good at SEO.
- rpep 4y agoThis 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.
- xnorswap 4y agoIt'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.
- schroeding 4y agoYep, I get Pepper[1], the robot from SoftBank as the first result. :D [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(robot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(robot)
- rpep 4y agoMy surname is Pepper and it didn't come up with me :D
- that_guy_iain 4y agoYea, we are pepper is on the second page for me.
- numpad0 4y agoI'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.
- tablespoon 4y ago> 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.google.com/search?q=pepper https://web.archive.org/web/20220216050301/https://www.googl...
- rsimmons 4y agoYeah 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.
- sterlind 4y agoI 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.
- qwerty456127 4y agoI expected to see Dr. Pepper :-) Never knew many people care to remember underwear brands.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jalqn 4y ago
- toxik 4y agoThis is just Google having you profiled to like women's undergarments.
- angelmm 4y agoIn 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.
- laborcontract 4y agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkTrJ7b4gvM
- dmor 4y agoThis is a Denver startup. go Fiona!!!
- swhalemo 4y agoSEO and its consequences...
- thaumasiotes 4y agoI'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.
- w1nk 4y agoThis 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.
- LtWorf 4y agoI just see photos of pepper plants and seeds. I suspect this is a viral marketing campaign.
- atemerev 4y agogoogling “pepper” gives me results about black pepper, everything seems to work fine (Switzerland).
- hnbad 4y agoDoing 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?").
- russellbeattie 4y agoGoogle 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.
- daneel_w 4y agoThis 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.
- neur4lnet 4y agoThere'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 4y agoI 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 4y ago>> 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.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThe primary example is Amazon, where I needed to go to page three for anything related to the Amazon.
- readthenotes1 4y agoWhy 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.
- notacoward 4y agoAh, the well known "apple effect" strikes again.
- klyrs 4y agoIn 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.