"Are You a CEO, Director, or Founder interested in a Feature Interview?"
All Interviews are 100% FREE of Charge
Nearly 20 years ago, Google reached a milestone: Merriam-Webster added “Google” as a verb to mean to search for something on the web.
This was amazing news for the company; Google had become so pervasive that it was now ingrained in our cultural and social vocabulary. The rest is history: Google has gone on to become one of the most profitable and powerful companies in the world.
But today, this special status is beginning to crumble.
“The verb ‘Google’ is dead,” Mark Shmulik of Bernstein Research and other internet analysts wrote in a note to investors. “Younger generations are ‘searching,’ not ‘Google’.”
The finding was the most significant one in new research on Gen Z that analysts released on Friday. Between 1997 and 2012, this generation was the first to experience life online, with many accessing the internet directly on their smartphones and apps rather than on a desktop computer and a web browser.
Now, Gen Z consumers are growing up to be a significant part of the economy. They’re changing the way things are done, which will create new winners and losers.
“Generation Z, and especially Gen Alpha, rarely use Google as a verb anymore, but simply say ‘search,'” Shmulik and his colleagues explained. “If you have teenagers, try asking them to look something up online and explain what they’re doing while they’re doing it, and see what they say.”
Instead, Gen Z will often look at the TikTok app for restaurant or hotel recommendations, or see a creator they admire promoting a new product that intrigues them and go directly to that brand’s app or website, analysts explained.
Should Google be worried about this “verb removal,” as analysts put it?
Maybe you’re worried that ceasing to be a verb means you’re no longer ubiquitous, which is not a good thing. Does anyone remember Yahoo’s “Do you Yahoo?” ad campaign? Probably not. And you probably stopped “Yahooing” in 2005.
But Google wasn’t too happy about becoming a verb at the time. When a company or product name becomes too widely known, it becomes hard to trademark it. Think about what happened to “aspirin” in the last century. So maybe Google is happy to no longer be a verb among young people.
I asked Shmulik, and he said:
“I “Being a verb feels important on the internet, given the scale, network effects, and technological advantages,” he said in an email. “I think the reason we don’t use verbs now is because technology and user behavior have advanced.”