Word of the Week
by Kerry Maxwell, author of Brave New Words, with recordings by speechinaction
Googling noun [U] 
Googler noun [C] 
‘… soon-to-be parents are Googling potential baby names to ensure their future little angel won't share his with a serial killer. An entrepreneur seeking venture capital Googled himself to see if his reputation would pass the due diligence process.’
Dennis McCafferty, USA weekend.com 28th April 2002
Google™ is arguably one of the most effective and powerful search engines on the Internet, which is why the searches at the end of Word of the Week articles use it. It accounts for up to 80 per cent of external referrals to most websites - if people want to find something online, they invariably take a look at Google™ search results, so it is no surprise that the name of this tool has become synonymous with the idea of the activity of searching the Net.
google as a transitive verb lies predominantly in the context of finding out information about people, as the quote above illustrates - fathers google prospective son-in-laws, patients google potential doctors etc, as if the lives of individuals are defined by all that is posted about them online. Passive use is very common here, individuals under scrutiny are, or very commonly get, googled. This has led to use as a participial adjective Googled, e.g. the Googled party. An especially common use is in the context of performing secret checks about potential boy- or girlfriends, e.g. … he Googled a woman he had a crush on and found out she was once at a party attended by Salman Rushdie. (New York Observer, January 2001). The compound Google dating has also been coined in this context.
The uncountable noun Googling is regularly used as a description of the activity, and Googlers are those who engage in it. The term is becoming so established that there is evidence for its use as a general reference to using any search engine on the Web, not necessarily Google™ itself.
Background
Google™ Inc. was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford PhD students who developed a technologically advanced method for finding information on the Internet, exploring ways to rank the popularity of results matching keyword searches. Google is a play on the term googol, coined by an American mathematician to refer to a number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Search the Web
Googling
Googler
Googled
Google dating
googol
Search with WebCorp.
Search with Web
Concordancer.
This article was first published on 25th July 2003.
Subject archive: technology - internet