Let's Ditch Google (Verb)

abcthingx

Say what you will, but using "google" is just the fastest way to say "search the web." Unless a better, equally convenient phrase comes along, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

sodapopcan

I've been doing this for a couple of years now and sometimes am That Guy and brings it up if someone keeps saying "google." It's also way past time to ditch Google (Noun), though that's an even harder sell. But, you should still do it.

lern_too_spel

If you regularly google things on Kagi, making google a generic term for search, Google loses its trademark protection. https://hallboothsmith.com/the-ninth-circuit-rules-google-is...

baggachipz

I've been doing this as well. Though ubiquitous brand names die hard, like "kleenex" and "saran wrap".

bitpush

Fun fact - Companies dont like their product name becoming a verb.

Nales

I have some triggers that make me stop reading or watching something. Using "google" as a verb is one of them. I perceive people doing that as blindly following a sort of cult, and I am not interested to learn anything from this kind of people.

Quothling

Around here "google it" has been replaced by "spørg botten" which means "ask the bot" or "spørg GPT". I've been putting an effort into saying "look it up" and stuff like it instead of "google it" for a couple of years now. Looks like it'll probably be wasted effort soon though.

asdfman123

This site is just foreign state actor propaganda now. Regardless of how you feel about US tech monopolies, they're doing their best to undermine them.

imhoguy

Searching is dying. I mostly hear "ask Claude/ChatGPT" these days. Googling will most of the time result in wall of slop on the first page unless you search with the exact source or site hint.

sdcfgy

Been correcting my kids on this for the last 10 years. It works. This was triggered by my mother Googling something on Bing.

semiquaver

I have no problem with this person choosing to use different language to describe this. 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!

tikhonj

I guess if you use kagi, you can say "I'll kag it" instead

s0ar3k

You could use the Andalusian Spanish word for looking up something, "bichear" :D

combobyte

Happy to ditch Google, full stop.

serbuvlad

I think this is focusing entirely on the wrong thing. 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!).

glerk

I hear “ask GPT”/“ask Claude” much more often these days.

rplnt

Searching for webpages, at least on google, have died like 10 years ago. Even if you knew the exact domain and words, it wouldn't be able to find it somehow. Always pushing "fresh results", changing your words (quotes or not), translating languages, etc... I tried to be smart and ruined everything that was good about it. On top of that web changed a lot and loads of content moved to private platforms. And now "AI".

Corence

There's already articles saying younger people are already doing this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/magazine/google-it-search...

Telaneo

Just google it with Bing. 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.

jmathai

I'm not anti-Google by any means. But their products just aren't as essential in my life like they were 10 years ago. I'm not in the majority but ... 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