No "Ungoogleable" In Swedish Lexicon, Thanks to Google

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @04:02AM from the english-is-more-open-source dept.

jfruh writes "The Swedish Language Council is a semi-official, government funded body that regulates, cultivates, and tracks changes to the Swedish language. Every year it releases a list of new words that have crept into Swedish, and one of 2012's entries was 'ogooglebar' — 'ungoogleable,' meaning something that can't be found with a search engine. After Google demanded that the definition be changed and the Council add a disclaimer about Google's trademark, the Council has instead decided to remove the word from the list altogether."

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For those Curious by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-26 04:10 · Score: 5, Interesting

For those curious to why Google raised a ruckus about this, there is a concept that once a word has become used in the more generic sense that the term may be used by other companies and the original company may lose their trademark rights . Xerox went through this in the 80's when Xerox was synonymous with photocopying... I remember my mom "Xeroxing" on the office machine even though it wasn't a Xerox. Xerox went through a significant ad campaign to get folks to change their behavior.
-- MyLongNickName