Would they feel better if we Yahooed instead?
With the word “Google” hitting the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary this summer, the search engine company wants to make sure people don’t confuse “Googling” with “Alta-Vistaing” or “A9-ing.”
Google has revised the form letter it sends out to writers it catches misusing its trademark to remind them that the Merriam-Webster definition of “Googling” – it’s supposed to be upper-cased – only applies to using the Google search engine.
“We want to make sure that when people use ‘Google,’ they are referring to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching in general. Google is making significant efforts to prevent misuse of our mark,” the letter says.
Attached is a list of appropriate and inappropriate uses of the word “Google,” all of which discourage its use as a verb.
Inappropriate: “I googled that hottie.”
Appropriate: “I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party.”
Inappropriate: “He googles himself.”
Appropriate: “He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he’s listed in the results.”
The letter doesn’t threaten legal action, but in a statement the company said it would defend itself “if needed” by “engaging in arbitration or litigation to enforce our trademark rights.”
Google turned up as a verb in print about five years ago, and a Google spokesman said the company has been warning writers about misusing its trademark for at least three years.
In its 2005 annual report, the company says it faces “a risk that the word ‘Google’ could become so commonly used that it becomes synonymous with the word ‘search.’
“If this happens, we could lose protection for this trademark, which could result in other people using the word ‘Google’ to refer to their own products, thus diminishing our brand,” the company said.
It’s a problem faced by many companies whose product names enter the mainstream – such as when people use the term Xerox to mean a photocopy, or TiVo as a verb meaning to record a TV program on a computer hard drive.
Google isn’t the only bit of computer technology to become verbified.
“To Skype” has come to mean using the Skype voice-over-Internet service, and a 1999 article in Forbes magazine said “Amazoning” means marketing products on the Web.