There's something fundamentally concerning with this response: "Things like this can change over time, brands can become stronger than the original meaning of a word even." The implication being that in that region, US, more people think of bras than condiments/fruit when they think of pepper. That Google is just reflecting the state of the world. That seems like bullshit to me. Made worse by the fact that enough peo…
That said, in Russia Google shows some very shady looking "discount code" website called Pepper as the first result - which I'm pretty sure is not better known or more desired than the fruit.
Google does not in fact yield anything related to actual peppers before page 3 of the result, Yandex at least has the decency to spit out Wikipedia's disambiguation page for "Pepper" as one of the first results.
I think this is a problem with how services don't let you specify your intent very well, and try to "guess" everything for you.
You can think of this as a different shape of the problem of online translation tools: If a user enters an idiom to be translated into a translation app, are they interested in a literal translation (which e.g. a language learner might be), or a semantic translation (maybe even into an idiom in the target language)? You can make guesses about which one will be more popular, but you'll also definitely get it wrong much of the time if users can't specify their intent.