48 points•speckx•about 8 hours ago•53 comments•

53 comments

kallebooabout 7 hours ago
I've been doing this since I started using Kagi since it sounds weird to say "I googled it and..." when I didn't actually use Google. I'm also not saying "I kagiied it" since half the people I talk to don't know what it is and for the rest it still sounds awkward so I've been going with variations for "I searched for it", "I did a web search", "I looked it up"...

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

advisedwangabout 7 hours ago
The kids where I tutored say "I searched it up"
1718627440about 7 hours ago
Here teenagers say "Chattie said ..."
weezingabout 7 hours ago
I told a clanker to do a web search for me and sloppify the answer
abcthingxabout 8 hours ago
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.
geocarabout 8 hours ago
I just "search".

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.

santadaysabout 7 hours ago
My kids and their friends say “search it up”. I have no idea if that’s representative of the tween/teen population. But google as a verb will likely die on its own. It’s been a while since I’ve xeroxed anything.
kazinatorabout 7 hours ago
I just web-search. Let me web-search that for you. According to a web search, it's fine.
dumberquestionsabout 8 hours ago
If you read the page, it suggests "to look up" instead of "to google", which looks like the same amount of syllables.
saghmabout 8 hours ago
That definitely puts it ahead of a lot of proposed replacements that end up being more syllables (which I firmly believe puts them in a disadvantage; I'm still looking for a reasonably terse generic word for "the person who delivers my mail" because "letter carrier" is a mouthful, and "mail person" just sounds like a weird way of referring to a man or boy, which is the opposite of what the generic term is for).

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.

catapartabout 8 hours ago
there's some weird hang ups in English that you have to be cautious of, though.

"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)".

Retr0idabout 8 hours ago
look up has the same number of syllables but it does not have quite the same semantic density, you can look something up without using a web search engine.
JoshTriplettabout 8 hours ago
"search for" is just as short, and "search" is shorter.
kazinatorabout 6 hours ago
To web-search (two syllables)

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, ...

tyingqabout 8 hours ago
They are actively transforming it into "ask Gemini" though. Which for me is often wrong. The organic search results are farther down, and if a lucrative term...you have to scroll past ads also. And the quality is not what it once was.

So Google is polluting what it means anyway.

Cider9986about 7 hours ago
Brave search is the best alternative to Google. They have an independent index and good UI. Very rarely do I switch to another engine. Brave does well at surfacing forum threads and the AI summary has been surprisingly good for a while.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/

semiquaverabout 8 hours ago
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!

Quothlingabout 8 hours ago
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.
echelonabout 8 hours ago
I really like this one. Unfortunately it doesn't quite make the jump to English, but I love the concept of it.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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