by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
In October 2006, Google's blog asked us all to help save Google. The search engine wanted to stop their name going the way of zippers, baby oil, brassieres and trampolines. The challenge was to keep 'Google' as a trademarked term and out of common usage.Andrew Girdwood
Google's own Google Trends product allows us to see that the phrase "googled" spiked in usage round about the same time as the blog post and has shown no signs of declining since then.
Google does not object to the word "googled" as such but to the word being used as a generic replacement for the concept of web searching. Google's lawyers would object to the phrase, "I googled Steve Jobs and..." but not to "I googled for Andy Beal on Google and..." In fact, Google gives us examples of uses of 'googled' in which their lawyers are happy.
This month we have seen sites like Slashdot and even the New York Times using phrases like 'Googling Oneself' in the way that might start Google twitching.
A look at Google's own archive of news stories reveals that the phrase 'googled' was used more in 2007 by mainstream media than 2006. In 2007 news sites indexed by Google's own news engine used 'googled' some 2,300 times which compares to only 1,540 in 2006 or only 919 in 2005.
Google's news archives even suggest that the phrase was used as far back at the 11th century. That would pre-date Cricket, a sport which uses the term 'google', and which traces its origin back to the 16th century.
Popular information site Wikipedia even hosts a page describing the use of Google as a verb. It is unlikely that Google's new Knol product and rival to Wikipedia will publish a similar article. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster include 'Google' but it should be noted that the Merriam-Webster's definition of 'Google' explicitly includes Google; "to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web".
It seems more than likely that Google's trademark lawyers will be busy in 2008 as the search engine fights to protect one of the world's most famous brands.
