Amusing “First Meanings” on Google

Posted 31 December 2006

Many English words have taken on new meanings in the digital world, often as product names. Since Google bases its search rank not on usage in traditional texts but only on usage on the web, it isn’t surprising that new meanings arrive much more quickly on Google than in dictionaries. Another interesting facet is the ads that appear, which of course typically reflect commercial interests. Here’s a few examples that I found amusing:

• Textile. Now this is a word that has been around a long time and is extremely widely used in commerce. Yet the first three results in Google refer to the somewhat obscure markup language. Over in the right column (the ads), of course, it is all about fabric.

• Mephisto. If you’re into great, though expensive, walking shoes, you probably know of the 40-year old, world-renowned Mephisto Shoes, and indeed shoe ads fill the right column. Mephisto Shoes does manage to keep first place in the Google search results. But right at number two is the site for the Mephisto blogging engine, the equally excellent (but much newer and less well known) blogging engine that this site runs on. Mephisto in the context of Mephistopheles, one of the chief demons of Christian mythology, doesn’t make the first page of results, other than in the context of the early 1980s movie of that name.

• Rails. Now here is a generic word with widespread usage and multiple meanings. Not too long ago the vast majority of associations would have had to do with railroad tracks. But 9 of the 10 results on Google’s first page refer to the three-year-old Ruby on Rails web framework (even when searching on the single word Rails). The ads are dominated by machine parts and bewildering ads like eBay’s “Rails: Whatever you’re looking for get it on eBay.”

• Mongrel. Surely there must be a million web pages about mongrel dogs. But result number one in Google’s list is the leading server for Ruby on Rails sites.

• Apple. Not until halfway down the second page of results do you get to anything about fruit. The savior is a page from Wikipedia, which I find is commonly the first site to appear in search results that reflects the more traditional meanings of a repurposed word. And no matter how many pages of listings you view, you won’t find any advertisements for fruit; no doubt this keyword has been bid far out of range for people selling things to eat.