Google

What is Google?

The word Google can mean three things:

1. Google, the company, which has many products, including:
2. Google Search (www.google.com), a web search engine.
3. Google, the verb: when someone says "google it," they mean to use Google Search to search for things on the web.

How to Use Google

Google has many features, both basic and advanced. See the guide How to Use Google for details.

"Google" It: Google, The Verb

Whenever someone says "google it," they're talking about using the search features of Google. This is one of the rare cases a website name becomes a verb. Another case was "to post on Twitter" becoming the verb "to tweet."

Note that nobody says "google it" when referring to the other Google products. Nobody calls sending an e-mail through Google Mail "googling it." It's just when you search with Google Search that it's called "googling."

Other engines also fail to enjoy this verbalization. Nobody honestly says "just Bing it" to mean "search for it on Bing."

Why Google is Called "Google"

Google was originally named Backrub. The name Google comes from a math expression that means 1 followed by 100 zeroes¹ (a "googol").

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References

1. https://about.google/intl/ALL_en/our-story/ (accessed 2024-04-03). ↩︎