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The Google (Joe)

When did Google — or google — become a verb?

Or scratch that. New question: WHY did google become a verb?

Ten years ago, people used to say "do an internet search." We would "do an internet search on snow leopards." Now we "google snow leopards." This wasn't the pre-Google era, exactly, but at that point probably most people used Yahoo! — but you would never see Yahoo! as a verb ("Yahoo the snow leopard"). Yahoo and Google are both two syllables, and yet only the more recent one became a verb.

And just as important, it became a generic verb. If I am going to wikipedia Tibet, I am going to look up the Wikipedia article on Tibet. If I am going to google Tibet, I am going to run an internet search on the term "Tibet," and I may or may not actually use the Google search engine.

Yeah, Google is the dominant search engine. And yeah, a single two-syllable word is simpler than a few words signifying a web-search. But isn't it just a bit odd that the public created this word (or verb form of a word) to capture a preexisting meaning for something that was surely somehow already in the common lexicon?

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4 responses to “The Google (Joe)”

  1. Ruchira

    Do people really say that they are going to “google” something when they are using Yahoo?
    As for a noun entering the lexicon as a verb, it is common enough although not always elegant. Multi-tasking, impacting, lawyering, interning, overdosing (or ODed) and parenting are all widely used verbs which began strictly as nouns. I feel very annoyed with commentators blathering on about “medaling” during the Olympics. Some nouns though do very well in their incarnation as verbs. Examples: Shanghai, railroad, bitch, tomcat and Bush (as in Bushed! on the Keith Olbermann Show, meaning that the worst disaster has befallen our world).
    But the specific point that you bring up about the proper name of a commercial product overriding others in the same category, I can think of a few others although not as pervasive as “google.” For example, Xerox or xeroxing was commonly used for photocopying even when you were using another brand of copier. A Kodak moment signifies any photogenic event, no matter if the film in your camera is Fuji. McDonald’s (specifically, its Big Mac burger) stands in for all fast food consumption.

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  2. Dean C. Rowan

    OED defines Google as a verb exclusively in terms of using Google, the “search engine.” One doesn’t (yet) Google using Yahoo! There is an earlier, lower case, form of the word, too, that has something to do with bowling or badminton.
    My two quibbles: first, the meaning was not already in the common lexicon, inasmuch as one searched the Internet using a variety of specifically constrained tools prior to the rise of the Web. Think WAIS or Gopher. The meaning of “Google” (or “google”) includes a nuance not expressed by the generic “search” or even “search the Internet” or “search the Web.” It specifies a mode of searching and the sorts of results we’ve come to expect from a fairly refined search tool, such as Google. Second, a more unfortunate semantic drift is with the phrase “search engine,” which was in use well before there was a Yahoo!, Lycos, or Google. These latter are not strictly search engines. Rather, they are Web applications that deploy search engines–the underlying algorithms and processor architectures–that allow them to process searches based on user input, then deliver the results for legible display. The battle has been lost with respect to this second mistake. We routinely accept the synecdochic use of “search engine” to refer to the whole package.

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  3. Anna

    The word always makes me think of the number 1 x 10 to the 100th power. The number, I just learned, is actually spelled “googol”; however, I also just learned that Google derived its name from googol. I learned this, of course, using Google.
    The number was one of my weird obsessions as a six or seven year old. I used to spend long stretches of time during recess in first grade carefully drawing ones with a hundred zeros after them. Googolplex was even cooler than googol, 10 to the googol power. I think the nature of the obsession could be described as: REALLY BIG NUMBER! Like the numerical equivalent of dinosaurs, another obsession of that period (not interests to make one super-cool with the in-crowd, unsurprisingly).
    According to Google on googol via wikipedia (a questionable chain of authority if there ever was one), this childhood interest was according to plan, and the number was invented, and named by a nine year-old to interest children in mathematics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex
    Worked with gullible little Anna, is all I can say, but I lost interest somewhere around calculus (no, no- that was much later!), though always found number theory interesting, if hard.
    Anyway.

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  4. Andrew R.

    Weird, I too was obsessed with the number googol as a kid. No wonder we fell in love.

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