Let's Ditch Google (Verb)(adam.farkas.pro) |
Let's Ditch Google (Verb)(adam.farkas.pro) |
While "google" may end up like the "kleenex" of web search, it seems more likely that people stop searching the web at all and just ask AI instead.
There's no good verb for "I asked ChatGPT", is there? "I slopped it"?
edit: maybe I'll bring back "bing it" since nobody would actually assume you're using bing for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrEHTd_3vD0
You did... what? You mean you asked AI?
I can't think how anyone is going to be confused and think I want them to check the bins or something, but maybe we search for different things on the web.
I'm still not convinced this is quite as ergonomic as it could be though because of a quirk of phrasing; instead of saying "I googled that", you'd need to say "I looked that up". As someone who often struggles to enunciate super well most of the time without my speech becoming slow to the point of tedious, it does still feel a bit more verbose because "googled" is such an awkward word that you can sort of pronounce it almost like 1.5 syllables by softening the second 'g' to produce something like "I goo-ulled that" and its still is intelligible. It still might be close enough that it can catch on, and I'm not at all opposed to it because of this minor inconvenience, but I do think that there are factors beyond a pure syllable count come into play even just in terms of linguistics rather than social convention.
"Hmm. Not sure. Maybe google it?" is pretty innocuous no matter the context.
"Hmm. Not sure. Maybe look it up?" can sound dismissive or condescending in some cases to some people's ear.
It's a weird quirk of English where being non-specific is like saying "I don't know, you figure it out", where being very specific is like saying "Here's the solution (that I would use)".
To google (two syllables, only slightly glibber, due to no "b-s" plosive-fricative combo).
Maybe "web search" can be shortened to "bsearch" or "besearch", like "web log" got shortened to "blog".
"besearch" has grammatical precedence: bestow, bequeath, behead, bewitch, belabor, befriend, ...
So Google is polluting what it means anyway.
But I do have a problem generally with attempts to impose language changes on others (in the case of this post you only see that tendency in the title).
This sort of linguistic prescriptivism seems in vogue for political reasons lately, most saliently in the hordes of people who insist that you must not use natural anthropomorphic language when talking about LLMs, but that’s far from the only political attempt to control language we’ve seen recently. Let people talk how they want! Langauage is an evolving thing that shouldn’t be controlled by scolds!
Google Photos -> Immich (better)
Google Search -> Claude (better)
Google Calendar -> Apple Calendar (better)
Google Chrome -> Safari or Firefox - someone please make a basic browser that can handle 30 tabs without needing gigs of memory
Google Maps -> .... I've been seeing if MapQuest is "good enough"
GMail -> .... I think Fastmail is "good enough" - GMail's bells and whistles aren't as important anymore
It pains me that DuckDuckGo has the name that it has, since you can't even pretend to want to use that as a verb. You can use generic terms, and that's what I tend to do (usually just 'look it up (on the web)', alternativly 'search the web'), but there's good reason google entered the common lexicon and functionally replaced those terms, and finding a replacement that is as good is very, very hard.
"Let me DuckDuckGo that for you." "I already DuckDuckWent."
It's also way past time to ditch Google (Noun), though that's an even harder sell. But, you should still do it.
It would be fascinating for Alphabet to lose Google the brand to being a generic word. (To be fair, it is something that maybe should have happened already.) Kagi or DDG or someone could use a domain like google.new or google.tech to easily retrain old habits of some users. What is Alphabet going to do in that case? If Google is no longer a trademark but a generic word, do they focus on having the "Alphabet Brand Google" or "The Original Google, by Alphabet"? Either way, that's harder to market and maybe easier to build a fresh brand than fight the generic terminology.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3006486.stm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21944834
its okay to not look but its weird to think other people don't.
This was triggered by my mother Googling something on Bing.
Non-Mac computers are still called "PC's", but IBM has nothing to gain from this. Similarly, copy machines at least in my country are called "Xerox's" but it's very rarely a machine from the Xerox company.
If you want to de-throne Google, you cannot do so by policing language. You have to build a better search (not more private! better!).
Well... thanks?
Don't listen to them, they're not your friends. And if you listen to enough motivated reasoning, you'll lose track of what's true and what's not.
Does the average consumer use "google it" to mean "search with Bing"?