All righty then. You have built a brand. It’s a really, good really popular brand, like, say Kleenex or Xerox. People use tissues, but call them Kleenex. People make copies but they call it Xeroxing. The search engine Google, as you probably know, has already become a household word. We google old boyfriends. We google products, news and street addresses. But what makes Googling, in my opinion different from using a Kleenex or Xeroxing, is that when people say they’ve “Googled,” about 99 times out of 100, they really actually went to Google to google whatever it is they wanted to google.
But Google, would prefer you not google. Or at least not use the word google to describe what it is you do on Google. In a polite letter to the Washington Post Google’s trademark lawyers respectfully asked if the Post could stop using Google as a verb. (The WaPo had recently published an article noting that Google had made its way into the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.)
Google’s posture here is curious, particularly to anyone who remembers the portal wars of the late ’90s. What Yahoo! wouldn’t have given to have people all over the world “yahooing” things. But alas, nobody Yahoos anything anymore. Well, that’s not quite right. I’m sure some people do, but I would bet my neighbor’s dog they don’t say they googled, when in fact they searched for something on Yahoo.
To drive home their point, Google also offers up a brief (and adorably pseudo hipsterish) list of the right and the wrong way to use the brand name Google. You might want to make a note of this:
Appropriate: He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he’s listed in the results.
Inappropriate: He googles himself.”
There are quite a few other examples, but the Post voted this one “best in show” and I totally agree:
” Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party.
Inappropriate: I googled that hottie.”
I appreciate Google’s desire to protect its brand, but the horse is long out of the barn and resting comfortably in the pages of Merriam Webster, the Washington Post and my everyday vocabulary.