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Court Rules the "Google" Trademark Isn't Generic
ericgoldman writes Even though "googling" and "Google it" are now common phrases, a federal court ruled that the "Google" trademark is still a valid trademark instead of a generic term (unlike former trademarks such as escalator, aspirin or yo-yo). The court distinguished between consumers using Google as a verb (such as "google it"), which didn't automatically make the term generic, and consumers using Google to describe one player in the market, which 90%+ of consumers still do.
...then I'll just have to start calling it the googley.
"Google" is not shorter than "search," and it even has more syllables.
You might even say this opens windows into trade mark law.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
BING
IS
NOT
GOOGLE
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That is how the word is used now, and the summery even states that the ruling takes this into account. They know that googleing is a generic word, but Google is not. A search engine is not called a google, only Google is called Google. This does not change just because googleing is a generic term for performing a internet searching.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
googleing is shorter than "performing a web search". Go google it, is quick than "go perform a web search on that".
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Fun fact. Check the reverse DNS of any Google server IP address, and it'll probably reside under xxxx.1e100.net
Actually, when people say googling, they really do mean "look it up using Google." They don't mean "look it up using DuckDuckGo" or "look it up using Yelp" or "look it up using Ask.com" or "look it up using Wolfram Alpha."
When Google no longer dominates generic web search (as opposed to specialized internet search like Yelp) and there are other comparable players, only then would there be a case for genericization. Until then, when you say googling, people think search using Google. That's actually fairly specific (unusually so even) in terms of word meaning.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
mind. blown.
planet texture maps and more
As a pedant, I'd like to note that aspirin did not become a generic as a result of its mass usage nor as the result of a court case, but was part of war reparations with Germany. See here for more detail, or just google it :-)
It wasn't just about interface. People tend to forget how search engines did an absolutely horrible job of intelligently ranking the sites you wanted to see. They relied primarily upon keywords and other sort of fairly obvious metrics on the site itself, which of course can be significantly gamed. I've seen "tag clouds" on some sites and blogs, which I'm presuming is due in part to one of the historical metrics being how large a visible word is on a site - the obvious presumption being that keywords in titles should be weighted more heavily.
Google showed up and not only provided a vastly superior interface (look, all you want is to search, right? Here you go!), it also was the very first search engine that actually had a really good chance at returning the most relevant search as the very first result due to it's PageRank algorithm - hence, the "I'm feeling lucky!" button. Such a button would have been labelled "I'd love to win the lottery!" for other search engines, since the results you were looking for might well be on page 13 of a hundred pages of results returned.
One could argue that although Google did not invent web searching, they may have been the first ones to invent truly effective web searching algorithms. It was only the pressure of Google's overwhelming effectiveness that forced other companies to significantly improve their own search engines. Even today, other companies have a hard time even reaching parity with Google search, let alone exceeding it, although such metrics are obviously somewhat subjective.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
That's really interesting how companies expend such huge efforts to make their brand a household name, and then they say they still want to own it for themselves exclusively. For example, so many people talk now about iphones, ipads and ipods as generic terms. That's sort of good for the vendor, but then when it really does become a generic term, they bring a ton of legal bricks down on anyone who does use their name generically. In other words, heads we win, tails you lose.
Another really evil example is "windows", which used to be a generic term, e.g. for the X window system. Microsoft continually tries to use words out of the dictionary to get "mind-share", and then they sue people who use their chosen dictionary words as they had existed for centuries. (The word "windows" comes from old English meaning "wind-holes". Maybe that's not what they really want you to think about though.) In my opinion, it is truly pernicious that so many companies are trying to steal words from the dictionary and pretending they own them. They should be obliged to invent their own words.
In this case, Google did at least get a nonsense word and slightly change it. I still have a children's book published in 1961 by Wonder Books: "The how and why wonder book of mathematics" by Esther Harris Highland and Harold Joseph Highland, where on page 4 it says: "What is a googol? It is 1 followed by 100 zeros. It is a number so large that it exceeds the number of raindrops that would fall on New York, Los Angeles and Chicago in more than a century. Yet, it is smaller than infinity." In the Introduction on page 2, they say: "If you wanted to find a googol, where would you look? In a zoo? Through a telescope? In a deep well? No, you would look in a mathematics book." Well, at least Google does seem to have changed the spelling a bit, which is to their credit.
It wasn't just about interface. People tend to forget how search engines did an absolutely horrible job of intelligently ranking the sites you wanted to see.
I find it pretty easy to remember - I go to Google today.
The UI was what made me switch both to Google originally and from it some years later. When I started using Google - and when Google started gaining significant market share - most users were on 56Kb/s or slower modem connections. AltaVista was the market leader and they'd put so much crap in their front page that it took 30 seconds to load (and then another 20 or so to show the results). Google loaded in 2-3 seconds. The AltaVista search results had to be a lot better to be faster. I switched away when they made the up and down arrow keys in their search box behave differently to every other text field in the system.
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I mean, specifically GO TO FUCKING GOOGLE.COM and use the search engine there. Not Bing, not whatever else, and especially not your "ask.com" tool bar that infected your computer. GOOGLE. Nobody uses it generically, they all mean specifically go to Google to search. It's you retards that don't know how to search that think we mean something else.