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While "google" may end up like the "kleenex" of web search, it seems more likely that people stop searching the web at all and just ask AI instead.
There's no good verb for "I asked ChatGPT", is there? "I slopped it"?
edit: maybe I'll bring back "bing it" since nobody would actually assume you're using bing for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrEHTd_3vD0
I can't think how anyone is going to be confused and think I want them to check the bins or something, but maybe we search for different things on the web.
I'm still not convinced this is quite as ergonomic as it could be though because of a quirk of phrasing; instead of saying "I googled that", you'd need to say "I looked that up". As someone who often struggles to enunciate super well most of the time without my speech becoming slow to the point of tedious, it does still feel a bit more verbose because "googled" is such an awkward word that you can sort of pronounce it almost like 1.5 syllables by softening the second 'g' to produce something like "I goo-ulled that" and its still is intelligible. It still might be close enough that it can catch on, and I'm not at all opposed to it because of this minor inconvenience, but I do think that there are factors beyond a pure syllable count come into play even just in terms of linguistics rather than social convention.
"Hmm. Not sure. Maybe google it?" is pretty innocuous no matter the context.
"Hmm. Not sure. Maybe look it up?" can sound dismissive or condescending in some cases to some people's ear.
It's a weird quirk of English where being non-specific is like saying "I don't know, you figure it out", where being very specific is like saying "Here's the solution (that I would use)".
To google (two syllables, only slightly glibber, due to no "b-s" plosive-fricative combo).
Maybe "web search" can be shortened to "bsearch" or "besearch", like "web log" got shortened to "blog".
"besearch" has grammatical precedence: bestow, bequeath, behead, bewitch, belabor, befriend, ...
So Google is polluting what it means anyway.
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!
Read the full thread on Hacker News →
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