I know of at least one Google vertical/service that is literally impossible to search for: "Electric vehicle charging station contractor". I have found it utterly impossible to rank electricians for keywords related to this because even using the exact Google category name I can only ever get charging stations!
A French keyword, "Peinture au fusil"/"peinture au pistolet" (i.e. spray painting) used to give us trouble because Google would systematically reinterpret it as "pistolet à peinture" (spray painting gun). That is, instead of a search for a service, it became a search for equipment and would be systematically overwhelmed with home hardware stores. This one was recently fixed in the latest core update, in a fashion: they just killed the 3-pack entirely for those keywords...
Do you have other examples or horror stories of Google trying to be smart and making the keyword completely unusable in the process?
A French keyword, "Peinture au fusil"/"peinture au pistolet" (i.e. spray painting) used to give us trouble because Google would systematically reinterpret it as "pistolet à peinture" (spray painting gun). That is, instead of a search for a service, it became a search for equipment and would be systematically overwhelmed with home hardware stores. This one was recently fixed in the latest core update, in a fashion: they just killed the 3-pack entirely for those keywords...
Do you have other examples or horror stories of Google trying to be smart and making the keyword completely unusable in the process?