“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

As I traverse the daily absurdities of life, I’m often caught between the dark, existential absurdism of Albert Camus (Camus was famous, but Sartre was smarter!) and the light, but also dark, comedy of Monty Python. “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world,” Camus wrote, but in French. Absurd, but similar in a sense to the absurdity of the Python sketch, “How Not to be Seen”. In this bit, several people “demonstrate the value” of not being seen because, once seen, one may just be shot or blown up. You just never know.

I am reminded of the “How Not to be Seen” skit because there are other things which demonstrate value but should not be seen. Consumers–that is, all of us–often have expectations which may not be known to retail companies. These expectations may be reasonable or unreasonable. We may expect a website to know exactly what we need or mean simply by landing on the home page or typing in a general search query. Things which should not be seen can in fact be fundamental to our contextual understanding and our shopping experiences. Patented, copyrighted, misspelled, or inappropriate words or concepts, for example, should not be seen in the wrong place or context. There are times when what needs (or wants) to be said can not be.

Taxonomists are word people driven by an insatiable compulsion to classify the world around them. Much of a taxonomist’s work is spent finding the right word form, and its synonymous variants and acronyms, so that a single word or phrase can represent a defined concept. Usually the intent of finding the right concept is exactly so that it can be seen, and understood, by end users. How can taxonomy professionals say what needs to be said without saying it at all? How can the valuable work of agreeing on common terms and phrases be obfuscated so that what needs to be said isn’t seen?

How Not to Say “Olympics”

Coming up in just a month is a perfect example of what’s not to be seen: the “Olympics”. Of course, we’ll all be seeing them on television, mottos and rings and all. However, using the word “Olympics” or any of their properties is highly restricted. A full explanation exists here: https://olympics.com/ioc/olympic-properties. I swim with a United States Masters Swim (USMS) team. Despite being an athletic organization, USMS and its subdivisions can’t have any events called “Olympics” or “Paralympics” even if they are for fun and without official times.

During the period around the Olympics, people rightly get excited. They want to purchase athletic equipment or apparel to support their favorite teams and sports. How do retailers say “Olympics” without saying “Olympics”? In these circumstances, representing the “real” or intended concept while using or redirecting from the stated–or unstated–concept requires some trickery. While pondering how this plays out for retailers, many of whom may or may not have legal contracts with athletes who are past or current Olympians, I visited some sites to conduct some very unscientific and informal searches. In the spirit of not being seen, I won’t mention the sites by name or all of the search terms I used because I can not speculate on what is actually going on behind the scenes, only what I believe may be happening to make the front end behave as it does.

I started my search by visiting several retail sites who would have an interest in selling products related to the Olympics. These sites include athletic apparel and product aggregation sites and I used the term “Olympics” as my search query directly on their site’s home page. Here’s what I found.

On the first site, I got a page full of products which will very likely be worn by athletes at the Olympic Games. There were no words or phrases appearing in the product names or descriptions linking the products directly to the “Olympics”. I suspect this product page was manually curated in the web content management system and search terms and variants for “Olympics” all redirect to this page. On the same site, I put in the name of an Olympic athlete and was presented with a page with products appropriate to that athlete and the sport with no mention of either the upcoming competition or the athlete’s name.

On the second site I chose, I got a handful of products searching for the term “Olympics”. Not very motivating, but at least there was something. I then searched for an athlete this company sponsors and got a page about the athlete. However, there were no associated products, only information about how this athlete is sponsored by the brand. I’d call this a missed opportunity. Show me your profile of the athlete, sure, but also give me something along the lines of “This athlete likes products x, y, and z.” If I’m a fan of an athlete, I might just buy what that athlete endorses, even if what I can buy isn’t the customized equipment used by an Olympian.

On the third site, searching the term “Olympics” brought me to a single product page for a sporting event which will be at the competition. Fine, but underwhelming. That’s it? That’s your stake in these upcoming sports? While I couldn’t find a specific Olympic athlete sponsored by this brand, I did find teams wearing their apparel. When I searched for one of these teams, I got similar products, but none for the team for which I searched.

On the fourth site, I got a message saying there were no products matching the term “Olympics”. While this company has avoided using a search term which they have no legal right to display, they have also missed a huge opportunity to move product during one of the largest sporting events around. No search should have an empty results page and should always redirect to something, even if only notionally related. As a consumer, I might bounce out of this site right here and now. I then searched for an athlete this company sponsors, and, almost unbelievably, the page again told me there were no related products. The term “Olympics” may not be available for use, but it was no secret which athlete this company sponsors. To not have any related products come up with their name was a big surprise.

On the fifth and final site, a retail aggregator, there seemed to be no restrictions on Olympics or brand name products with some or most of the items available branded themselves. To be honest, I don’t know how they get away with it, and I would need to talk to someone familiar with business law to get an answer. Perhaps there is a blanket agreement with The IOC (International Olympic Committee) allowing the term to be used in search, product names, and product descriptions since the term appeared in all of those locations. I doubt if many of the numerous sellers on the site have a direct agreement with the IOC, but I did find a few products that claim they were officially licensed merchandise. Here, any and all search terms brought at least something back.

How Not to Say Your Competitor’s Name

In a world of fleeting social media trends, there is opportunity to ride a popularity wave by creating similar, or even highly contrasting, products. If you like product A, you’ll love the similar (but better!) product B. Or, you used to like product A, but it is so last week, so check out product B as the next trend. With this in mind, my next experiment was searching for competitor’s names and products across sites. Again, I searched directly on the company home page seeking competitor names or products.

Back on site one, searching the competitor’s company name defaulted to a page of undifferentiated products. Again, these are probably manually curated to line up against the competition’s offerings. Since my search was vague, the product offerings spanned just about everything. When I tried a more specific, and trending, product name, I was brought to a page of products which had similar characteristics. Again, there is no mention of the competitor or their product. However, there was a general sense of “if you like this, you might also like this”. I’d call this a win for the retailer. If I came looking for something from another brand expecting to find something similar from this brand, then I may have some brand loyalty and want an equivalent product without having to shop their competitor.

On the second site, I got a message saying there were no products matching the term for their competitor’s name. Similarly, I was not shown any products when I typed in the specific name of a competitor’s offering. Disappointing, especially since there are similar products to be found on the site. It is impossible to know what strategy, if any, this retailer is employing. Maybe they don’t see their competitors as a threat. Maybe they haven’t found a mechanism for presenting similar products. Maybe I just happened to pick a competitor’s name and product they don’t match to. Regardless, coming up with nothing prompts me to look elsewhere.

On site three, I got the same message saying there were no results: an empty set for my search term. When I typed in the name of a popular rival product, I was shown two products which had almost nothing to do with my search. They showed me something, but it gives the searcher the impression that this company doesn’t sell similar products, which is false. If you come to the site with intent, you can probably find what you’re looking for, but if you come with an open-ended search, you will likely be disappointed.

Site four brought up one product when a competitor’s name was typed into search. While the rival company does in fact sell similar products, it’s debatable whether the product this site returned was representative of the other brand. When I typed in a rival brand’s product name, I got no results. Again, an empty results set. The brand does offer a row of their most popular apparel beneath my “no results” message, but this may or may not have any semblance to the product I’m trying to compare.

Finally, site five yet again brought up numerous products both for brand and product names. I can’t speak to whether the products are genuine or knock-offs and whether the sellers have any rights to sell those products. What a few searches prove on an aggregate retailer site is that they carry anything and everything.

In summary, I believe some retailers are mapping competitor brand and specific product names to similar products they carry. I’ll speculate that they do this on the front end, manually mapping products that retailer carries to search terms which don’t show in dropdowns, navigation, product names, or product descriptions. In this way, consumers get a reasonable comparative product results set without the retailer getting into legal trouble showing event names like the “Olympics”, competitor brands, or competitor brand products.

How Not to Say the Unsayable

I’ve been focused on retail sites because that’s the environment I work in today, but this idea of redirecting to the proper term came to my attention in my first taxonomist job as an assistant thesaurus editor at an academic institution. At this company, subject matter experts manually indexed academic articles in a variety of humanities disciplines. Their index spanned over 100 years worth of articles and had been indexed across the span of decades.

Over the course of their work, language changed and terms fell in and out of use. Maintaining a thesaurus of thousands of concepts displayed in a flat list made long-term curation and governance challenging. Terms usually fell out of use as indexing terms to match their use, or lack of use, in the text. Many of these zombie terms lived on in the thesaurus until sometimes they were found by an indexer and used again.

I apologize in advance for the terms I’m going to put into print here, but I think it’s important to underscore exactly what language was appropriate at the time the article was written and the difference between terms we use now to express the same ideas. One term that popped up in indexing was “mixed bloods”. It only took one glance to know that was not a term we should be using to index academic articles. As I recall, the article did in fact use that phrase, and it was probably an older article being indexed long after the term fell out of use. So, how do we remain true to the spirit of the article while also remaining true to the integrity of the institution and keeping up with appropriate and inoffensive language? In this case, common thesaurus parlance and structures were utilized, using the Used/Used For relationship to point from one term to another. The old term was turned into a synonymous (but hidden) “use” term and the more modern term, probably “multiracial”, was the new “used for” term. A thesaurus redirect then addresses the current as well as all past indexing. Anyone typing in the former term will automatically be redirected to the newer term and the articles indexed with both concepts.

Another example, used frequently in the writing of Martin Luther King, Jr., is the term “negro”. I think this is a good example of intent and the problematic use of inappropriate language. When MLK, Jr. used the term, it was the “acceptable” parlance of his day and was used 15 times in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. When keyword indexing a piece of literature like this speech, it’s important to capture the subject matter, but we need to recognize the now problematic terminology. Again, using redirects from appropriate terms to older indexed terms solves this problem and can be done again in the future if current terms fall out of favor.

The latter example can quickly lead down a slippery slope of intent and political speech. People say–and imply–what they shouldn’t all the time in political speech. How we recognize and address that speech depends on the context.

How Not to Say what You Want to Say with a Wink and a Nudge

Back to not saying what you want to say when you need to not say it. Riding quickly-changing trends can be a huge revenue vehicle for many companies, especially if they are able to pivot quickly and sell the message to the right audience. As I’ve said before, taxonomy development lags behind current trending language, both because of the amount of work involved in maintaining a vocabulary but also because of literary warrant. While the concept was established when indexing written works, the principle still applies to fast-paced corporate environments. Add concepts to your taxonomies when they have proven their value or staying power. Anything trending or temporary should be managed another way.

Let’s look at an example. When Barbie was released on July 21, 2023, searches for “Barbie pink” and “pink” spiked according to Google Trends. In addition, searches for “Barbie” and “pink” in various combinations with specific brand and product names also rose. While a retail company might ride this wave and create collections of pink product landing pages, many do not have licenses with Mattel to use the term “Barbie”. Hence, products needed to be assembled based on terminology that in whole or in part, yet again, couldn’t be spoken or displayed.

What are some ways to do this while leveraging controlled metadata values from taxonomy in search? Taxonomists can request on-site search logs from the search team and analyze and mine these concepts for candidate terms. Analyzing search logs is valuable, but making an informed decision as part of the retailer search strategy is even better. Work with marketing and analytics and insights colleagues to identify top competitors and products and map them as appropriate to your company’s competing products. Consumers will be pleasantly surprised when they type in a competitor product and land on a page of very similar products offered by your company. These search terms can then be added to taxonomies strategically.

For anything with staying power (i.e., it has literary warrant) consider using skos:hiddenLabel to redirect to results. Skos:hiddenLabel is “A lexical label for a resource that should be hidden when generating visual displays of the resource, but should still be accessible to free text search operations” (W3C). A hidden label can be associated to a preferred label concept just like an alternative label. For each appropriate product, map it to a competitor or product name stored as a hidden label so any searches using a term on the company’s front that can not legally be displayed redirects to the correct similar products tagged with that competitor name.

This method brings up two important questions. Should you use skos:hiddenLabel or its equivalent in a consuming system to redirect from forbidden terms to mapped, and potentially displayable, concepts and products? Yes! Can you store and use forbidden terms in your taxonomy or other systems? Maybe! I have not researched the legality of holding concepts like this in a company’s data. While it’s clear there are concepts which can not appear anywhere on a company’s site, it’s not clear (at least to me) whether that data can exist hidden in a database. The argument could come down to intent. A company can’t control what a user types into their search box and is recorded in the search index, but they can control the results that are shown. If a company intentionally redirects based on a stored concept, is that ok? My guess is yes since so many companies do it, but it could be that it’s not worth pursuing legally if it’s not on full display. I’ll make a point of looking into the subject more.

Another method along similar lines is to store terms which should not be displayed either as individual concepts within an organization’s taxonomy or as a completely separate taxonomy of concepts which should never be displayed but can still be tagged to content. This method carries more risk as concepts which should not be published for use or are published for specific use can quickly become dissociated from their intent by consuming systems and users. One tagging mistake may reveal a hidden concept on public-facing properties. While this method makes the hidden concepts clearer to manage on the back end, it can have serious repercussions if not governed properly.

When it comes to trending topics, a more flexible approach may be warranted. Not all concepts have staying power, as is evidenced by the trending “Barbie” searches. Therefore, trying to maintain these trending, quickly-changing concepts in taxonomies is unsustainable. In cases like this, using large language models (LLMs) or text analytics may quickly identify trending concepts from multiple sources, including organic and on-site search terms, product reviews and descriptions, and social media feeds. These trending concepts can then be mapped automatically to taxonomy values using semantic similarity to concepts in the product metadata or in the product titles and descriptions. Because these models can operate more quickly on incoming data, it’s possible to act on search terms as they come in rather than spending time codifying them in taxonomies for reuse when these terms probably won’t last long as a topic. Rather than storing the concepts long-term, they are only stored in the model long enough to create mappings to products to assemble product landing pages. These logs can be purged regularly as trends change. Treating all concepts as viable ways to boost search but then being more strategic about which terms wind up as preferred or hidden labels in a taxonomy versus concepts which are essentially fleeting keywords to match trends is a more mature level of taxonomy application.

Like not being seen, not saying what you mean is a valuable skill. Ask any politician. Better, put it into practice in your searches and make some consumers happy.