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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Using Google as a verb.

Complaining about it now only makes it obvious that you waited too long. You allowed the word Google to become deeply ingrained in our speech about the internet. It seems you enjoyed the attention when it served the interest of trumpeting the dominance of your brand. Now that it's become wholly natural for us to use Google as a verb, you want us to to make a conscious effort not to use it. We're supposed to pay attention to you all over again?

IN THE COMMENTS: Drew makes a stunning point:
I don't know about the rest of y'all, but when I go to "google that hottie" I go to google.com and type in her name.

Google's success and thus popularity is in their superiority to the competition. The verbification (I apologize for my english) has only served to increase their popularity.

Google is crucially different from other products, like Xerox, that had good reason to work hard protect their trademarks from becoming generic. The only way to do what the verb expresses is to go to a website. The way to get to a website is to use the name. If everyone says they're "googling," everyone goes to Google. They don't happen to go somewhere else to "google." What competitor would even want to trade on the name Google by saying come to our site to "google"? It would just send people to Google. As long as Google has the URL "Google," it benefits from everyone using the word.

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