Let's Ditch Google (Verb)
The author reflects on their continued use of the verb "to Google" despite not using the service for three years. They acknowledge that the search engine's historical monopoly has deeply influenced common language. The writer commits to using generic terms like "look up" or "search" to be fair to their current provider, Kagi.
- ▪The author has not used google.com for three years but still uses the term "to Google" for web searches.
- ▪The writer attributes this linguistic habit to the lasting impact of Google's search engine monopoly.
- ▪The author plans to switch to generic verbs like "look up" and "search" to avoid favoring a specific brand.
- ▪The writer identifies as a user of the Kagi search engine.
- ▪The post argues that using eponyms for a different service is unfair to the actual provider being used.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Adam Farkas |
| Canonical URL | https://adam.farkas.pro/lets-ditch-google-verb/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:18:18 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-30T17:32:02.087Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-30T17:32:02.087Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YwGFWyuiUv_3 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
26 Sep 2026 tech Let's Ditch Google (verb) Even without using google.com for three years now*, when I ask somebody to look up something on the web, I still use "to Google" (in German, "zu googeln") for that. The years of Google's search engine monopoly still work hard in me…Starting today, I will pay more attention and use the generic words "look up", "search" ("nachschauen", "suchen") . It's not even that I am totaly against eponyms (Deonym), its just unfair to the search engine I actually use for naming it differently. We'll see how well this will go.* Happy kagi.com user
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Adam Farkas.
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