Amazon misspells a word.

[snarp]

...What's actually going on here is probably something like this:

Google has a policy that, when sorting search results for relevance, pornographic media is never relevant if it is possible that the intent of the search is something non-pornographic. For any other subject, the standard is most likely: it's most likely that the person searching for "rebook shoes" is in fact looking for Reebok shoes, not for a synopsis of the picture book Rebook, The Elf Who Returned A Library Book On Time, which happens to mention that the title character wears pointy shoes. So the Reebok homepage is the first hit.

If Google treated sneakers the way it treats porn, though, Reebok's homepage wouldn't show up at all, because it's possible that someone wanted that elf book. Words and phrases that have both sexual and nonsexual meanings - even if the sexual one is more commonly-used - don't return porn when you google them. This is because parents looking for information about spanking are going to be more unnerved by the inclusion of porn in their search results than are porn-seekers about earnest interviews with child psychologists.

Google employs hordes of actual human beings to decide whether a query is actively looking for porn. Yes, that's right: it is possible that your "benedict cumberbatch holmes/basil rathbone holmes h/c handjob" query has been evaluated for pornbiguity by a bored part-timer. (It didn't happen in real-time, if that makes you feel better.) This part-timer looks at the one-word query "spanking," goes "well, this could be a new parent or something," and marks it as a No-Porn query. The same part-timer, unable to imagine a second and innocent meaning for the phrase "spanking adult xxx [celebrity name]," will mark it as Porn-Okay.

(S/he also researched the term "h/c" to make sure it didn't modify "handjob" in a way that altered the meaning of the term. Because Google's mission is to organize all the world's information, goddamn it.)

So: because Orgasm blush is fairly popular, and probably NARS's best-selling product, when you type "nars" into the Google bar, the second autosuggest result, after just "nars," is "nars orgasm." The overpriced makeup is not porn, so Google's fine with including it in its autosuggest.

It seems a little weird that Amazon, who're actually selling the blush, are also the ones acting embarrassed by its name. My guess is that what's going on here is that Amazon has not, at least in the realm of pornbiguity, given quite as much responsibility to their human query analysts as has Google. They've instead gone the simpler (and maybe cheaper) route of compiling a dictionary of terms too suggestive to autosuggest. A human being would've told autosuggest to say "nars orgasm," but Amazon's apparently either using a filter to make that decision, or allowing a filter to override the humans. Interestingly, though, Amazon will correct its own autosuggestion if you actually run a search for "nars orgasim":



And it even gives you the blush as the first hit! So, some search algorithm over there is clearly internally aware enough of the existence of the word "orgasm" to know that "orgasim" is a misspelling thereof - yet the apparently-slightly-separate autosuggest algorithm is set to ignore the correctly-spelled version of the word, but use the misspelling.

Why would that be? I think this is the answer: I just checked, and while Amazon will not autosuggest the term "pocket rocket," it will put the well-known sex toy by that name first in the search results; a camping stove and tricycle by the same name comes second. On Google, the first three results are bikes. So while Amazon's autosuggest is more conservative than Google's, their actual search results are less so.

This makes financial sense because Amazon's goals aren't the same as Google's: Google makes their money from ad revenue, and it's good for them when a porn-seeker has to try two or three different queries to get something unambiguous enough to open the porngates. Amazon, on the other hand, stand to lose a sale by burying the customer's most likely goal too deep. They put the vibrator at the top, because even though it's possible that the searcher's looking for a tricycle, it's not as likely. I just tried both queries on eBay, and it uses the same strategy - though it will thoughtfully suggest "nars blush" as more delicate alternative.

Incidentally, if you spent this whole entry wondering whether I bought the blush, I did not. Google's second autosuggest was "nars orgasm dupe," which gave a number of cheaper recommendations. I'm sure Amazon will someday come up with a way of offering this, too. Just for the products it offers, though.

Edit: Sometime between the time I started writing this and today, Amazon started autosuggesting "pocket rocket!" I WONDER WHICH ONE THEY MEAN.