Google first showed up as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary back in 2006. It was a milestone moment of sorts for the search giant, which by that

To Gen Z, Google is just a relic – not a verb anymore

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2024-10-31 01:30:04

Google first showed up as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary back in 2006. It was a milestone moment of sorts for the search giant, which by that point was already so ubiquitous that its very name had become synonymous with the act of searching for anything on the web. Likewise, that worldwide recognition of its search engine’s usefulness helped turn Google, the company, into one of the most important, powerful, and certainly the richest tech giants of all time.

That said, Rust Cohle wasn’t kidding around with that great line about time being a flat circle. Because nothing remains fixed or static in perpetuity — not even for a company with a more than 90% market share of internet search.

Gen Z, for example? Talk to them about looking for something online, and a new study reveals that rather than “Googling” whatever they’re trying to find … it’s back to simply being a “search” for them. Which might sound like barely meaningful semantics, until you stop to consider the significance of why they’re using that specific nomenclature.

Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z is the first digitally native generation, a generation that was also the focus of a new Bernstein Research study published in recent days. And that generation’s “de-verbing” of Google matters, because for them? It’s a reflection of the fact that Google is simply no longer the useful one-stop-shop for information that it was in the good old days.

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