Google first showed up as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary back in 2006. It was a milestone moment of sorts for the search giant, which by that point was already so ubiquitous that its very name had become synonymous with the act of searching for anything on the web. Likewise, that worldwide recognition of its search engine’s usefulness helped turn Google, the company, into one of the most important, powerful, and certainly the richest tech giants of all time.
That said, Rust Cohle wasn’t kidding around with that great line about time being a flat circle. Because nothing remains fixed or static in perpetuity — not even for a company with a more than 90% market share of internet search.
Gen Z, for example? Talk to them about looking for something online, and a new study reveals that rather than “Googling” whatever they’re trying to find … it’s back to simply being a “search” for them. Which might sound like barely meaningful semantics, until you stop to consider the significance of why they’re using that specific nomenclature.
Born between 1997 and 2012, this was the first digitally native generation, a generation that was also the focus of a new Bernstein Research study published in recent days. And that generation’s “de-verbing” of Google matters, because for them? It’s a reflection of the fact that Google is simply no longer the useful one-stop-shop for information that it was in the good old days.
Younger internet users who want to learn something, for example, are much more likely to start with TikTok. Want to know what real people think about a product, a book, a TV show? Reddit is a more natural starting point for that kind of query. When I’m looking to by something, myself, I tend to start with Amazon or whatever retailer’s app or webpage that I have my eye on. If I want to know what time a movie is playing? I go to my local movie chain’s app, never Google.
You get the idea.
“I feel like being a verb matters in internet given scale/network effects and a technology advantage,” Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik told a Business Insider reporter. “I think if you de-verb now, it’s because tech and user behavior has moved forward.”
Moved forward, indeed. It is endlessly fascinating to me that — in response to the rise of intelligent and useful chatbots like ChatGPT as well as a hunger for insights from real people — Google essentially took everything that people once loved about the search engine and chucked it all out the window. Goodbye simplicity, usefulness, and clean design. Hello ad-cluttered hellscape of AI-generated garbage. And hello a world where Google isn’t a verb anymore, as a result of all its many self-inflicted errors.