{"id":8187,"date":"2006-08-12T09:40:08","date_gmt":"2006-08-12T13:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8187.html"},"modified":"2006-08-12T09:40:08","modified_gmt":"2006-08-12T13:40:08","slug":"google-tm-all-rights-reserved-fights-the-dreaded-verb-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/google-tm-all-rights-reserved-fights-the-dreaded-verb-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"Google (TM, \u00a9, all rights reserved) fights the dreaded ‘verb effect’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Morbo<\/a><\/p>\n

Ninety-nine percent of us call plastic flying discs Frisbees, but guess what, some of them aren’t. Wham-O makes Frisbees. Other plastic flying discs are just that.<\/p>\n

Products can become too successful. When this happens, their names often become generic stand-ins for all similar products.<\/p>\n

It can happen to services too. Consider the Google search engine. “Google” is now in the dictionary. People use it as verb. This upsets the owners of Google. If a young woman meets a man at a bar and writes about it on a blog, the owners of Google do not want her to write, “I googled that guy I met last night.” They want her to say something like, “I used the Google search engine to gather information about that guy I met last night.”<\/p>\n

I’m serious. Recently, Google’s lawyers sent a letter about this to The Washington Post<\/a>. It included examples of appropriate and inappropriate usages. Here are two:<\/p>\n

Appropriate: He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he’s listed in the results.
\nInappropriate: He googles himself.<\/p>\n

Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party.
\nInappropriate: I googled that hottie.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, Google actually used the word “hottie.”<\/p>\n

The Post reporter noted that the letter was hand-addressed. My guess is the company has hired people to do nothing but examine publications, blogs and websites and send out threat letters every time an “inappropriate” usage appears.<\/p>\n

Look, I will grant that Google deserves to be capitalized. After all, not every tissue you use for blowing your nose is a Kleenex. But if the company really expects people to say things like, “I ran a Google search for information on Genghis Kahn to help me with my term paper” they are dreaming.<\/p>\n

Google’s owners should be happy their product is so successful. Many people I know never use any other search engine. After all, when was the last time you heard someone say, “I webcrawlered that guy I met in the bar last night”?\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Morbo Ninety-nine percent of us call plastic flying discs Frisbees, but guess what, some of them aren’t. Wham-O makes Frisbees. Other plastic flying discs are just that. Products can become too successful. When this happens, their names often become generic stand-ins for all similar products. It can happen to services too. Consider […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}