Two Names of Everything

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Two Names of Everything

I’ve decided that internet SEO has pickled my brain. But in a good way. Earlier in the week I was searching for some house paint across different parts of the web, and found myself totally baffled by the product names.

Here’s the product’s name as it appears on the manufacturer’s own website; though only if you’re already browsing the “White” category.

• Easycare Washable & Tough Matt

Here’s how the same paint displays on the website of one of the UK’s biggest DIY retailers.

Easycare Pure brilliant white Matt Wall & ceiling Emulsion paint

And here’s the same product on Amazon

Pure Brilliant White Easycare Matt Emulsion Paint 5L – Washable & Stain Resistant, Durable Matt Finish, Quick Dry, Low Odour Interior Wall & Ceiling Paint

Now I don’t know about you but the Amazon product title is the best one. It tells me almost everything I need to know about it without having to go one click deeper and read the description or the fact sheet.

Most of the time when I’m looking for something online, when I know what I want, much to the probable chagrin of managers everywhere, I barely think about product names at all. I’ll usually searching by product code, or SKU. But since the paint I was looking for doesn’t prominently give me those details on the manufacturer’s website, I had to vague search it.

I’ve been thinking this week that the hyper optimised SEO product titles on Amazon arn’t really product names at all. They are dense clusters metadata that that gradually resolve into a high-fidelity conceptual idea of a product as you explore the listing. You look at the photos. Read the bullet points. Check the specifications. Skim the reviews. The object slowly comes into focus as you learn more.

I was just scrolling back though my last few months of Amazon orders and instead of thinking about what I actually bought, instead paying attention to what the products were actually called on the page, and have been some what amazed.

What a strange world we live in, where perfectly ordinary household objects apparently have names like:

• SUN BUM MOISTURIZING Sunscreen Lotion Cream SPF 15 (US Import) | Broad Spectrum Moisturizing Sunscreen with Vitamin E, Hawaii 104 Act Compliant (Made without Octinoxate & Oxybenzone)
• SOULWIT Replacement Earpads for Bose 700 (NC700) Wireless Headphones, Ear Pads Cushions with Softer Leather, High-Density Noise Cancelling Foam, Added Thickness – Black
• Acana Hanging Moth Killer & Freshener, 8 Pack – Lavender Fragrance, Natural Oils – for Wardrobes – Protects Clothing & Bedding – Each Lasts Up to 3 Months

Imagine walking into a shop and browsing the shelves and saying “Ah yes! this eco-eco A5 50% Recycled 20 Pocket Presentation Display Book- Sustainable Portfolio Folder for Artwork,Certificates, Documents – Eco-Friendly Storage Case, Ideal for School & Office Use-Black-Pack of 1″ is exactly what i’m looking for“?

Of course you wouldn’t. You’d say “There’s the plastic document wallet”

That’s because in the physical world, finding the thing and confirming the thing happen in the same moment. You spot the shelf, recognise the brand, notice the colour, and pick it up.

Online, the two jobs of naming and branding get pulled apart.

In the physical world, names exist after perception. I see the tin of paint, recognise the brand, notice that it’s white, and then the product name confirms, or identifies what your are looking at.

Online, the title exists before perception. I haven’t seen the object yet. All I have is language. The title has to conjure the thing into existence in my imagination strongly enough that I click.

Amazon product titles are compressed descriptions of every plausible way someone might search for that object. You vague search the thing your looking for, and some part of the SEO word salad in the title snares on your fishing line, and leads multipul people who think about the same product in different ways to the same listing.

Then I order the paint, and it arrives on my door step and the long listing name resolves back into its retail/object identity.

So the paint I was looking for has two identities:

In a physical environment, filled with contextual queues that I’m in the DIY shop, in the paint aisle it’s retail identity is the name printed on the tin:

• Easycare Washable & Tough Matt – White

Obviously there is a wider system here: of SKU, barcodes, store inventory etc that’s driving the tins shelf placement, but we’ll set that aside for now.

But online the same products semantic retrieval identity becomes:

• Pure Brilliant White Easycare Matt Emulsion Paint 5L – Washable & Stain Resistant, Durable Matt Finish, Quick Dry, Low Odour Interior Wall & Ceiling Paint

Which is a name optimised for robots rather than humans. Google indexing, Amazon search engine, autocomplete algos, and my own human vague searching. The name itself is a retrieval programme written in English.

These kinds of weird product names are interfaces between humans and computational systems. They’re written simultaneously for search engines, recommendation algorithms, embedding models, autocomplete, AI systems and, almost as an afterthought, the human reader. Who is looking for the object, rather than the items location in a systems. Which means that these kinds of titles are a compromise language spoken between people and machines.

Obviously this has been going on for nearly 25+ years since SEO became an industry, and once you notice it it’s difficult to unseen. But the thing is over the years I had ‘unseen’ it. Glossing over the word salad in the search results like a cyber hunter gatherer looking for red berries in a sea of green. It took an hour of researching a specific thing, trying to find its location in amazon, as comparing it to it’s presentation (and price.. it’s actually cheaper on ebay lol) on the manufactures website as well as in store — where location means something very different.

More and more of our writing now has two audiences. There’s the person reading it, and there’s the system that needs to retrieve it, rank it, classify it, summarise it or act upon it.

In a world where natural language is increasingly becoming the interface to computation itself; where we can manipulate it’s physics simply by describing what we want, I think the weird Amazon titles a kind of early dialect, or example, of who everything becomes fluently addressable to both humans and machines. Amazon product titles really do look like Claudes increasingly weird AF chain of thought and self babble for example.

On The Blog

Jul 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 7. Photo-a-day for the month of Jul 2026.

Photo 365

Terminal Access

Really enjoyed this written interview with Simon Willison on blogging:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

Reading

I finally got round to starting the first book in the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. I’m only about half way through Too Like the Lightning but its definitely fantastic. I can see why it basically won every award possible when it came out.

I finished The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete this week. I’ve been reading it since I was in Sri Lanka in December. There is nothing like a work of 14th-century Christian mysticism to reset ones sense of direction, and understanding. It is a humbling book. That this woman’s work, a work of self annihilation, to a state where the individual will is entirely surrendered to Divine Love can speak across time and context and inspire is just remarkable. It’s because, I think, this book speaks of something ‘real’. That she was burned at the stake in Paris for it in 1310, and became one of the first people executed for mystical heresy in the Latin West makes the whole book even more remarkable.

Karmanjakah – Diamond Morning (LP)

I recently discovered Karmanjakah, and the track Dove was my way in. I was basically sold on their schtick in the first 10 seconds of the song. Then the soaring clean melodic vocals came in and they became something else.

I’d describe it as cinematic progressive metal I guess. I really liked having the album on when cleaning the flat the other morning. It’s optimistic sounding. Which is something we all need a little more of.

Remember Kids:

Kilby developed a thermal printing technique, in which a low-power printing head would “burn” images into heat-sensitive paper; the idea worked perfectly, and the process is still widely used in low-cost, power-efficient printers.

The Chip by T. R. Reid