YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Let's Ditch Google (Verb)

50 points speckx 57 minutes ago 55 comments

abcthingx 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

dumberquestions 49 minutes ago | parent

If you read the page, it suggests "to look up" instead of "to google", which looks like the same amount of syllables.

Retr0id 46 minutes ago | parent

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.

catapart 45 minutes ago | parent

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)".

saghm 42 minutes ago | parent

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.

applfanboysbgon 27 minutes ago | parent

Which falls apart as soon as you actually use the word outside of a dictionary. Nobody says "to google". They say "I googled it", or "google it", the equivalents being "I looked it up" and "look it up", each introducing another word and syllable. "I looked up" and "look up" don't work. It's embarrassing somebody could write a suggestion like this without applying 3 entire seconds of thought to it.

tyingq 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

geocar 45 minutes ago | parent

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.

santadays 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

JoshTriplett 45 minutes ago | parent

"search for" is just as short, and "search" is shorter.

sodapopcan 50 minutes ago | parent

I've been doing this for a couple of years now and sometimes am That Guy and brings it up if someone keeps saying "google."

It's also way past time to ditch Google (Noun), though that's an even harder sell. But, you should still do it.

lern_too_spel 50 minutes ago | parent

If you regularly google things on Kagi, making google a generic term for search, Google loses its trademark protection. https://hallboothsmith.com/the-ninth-circuit-rules-google-is...

monknomo 47 minutes ago | parent

I prefer to google on duck duck go

baggachipz 50 minutes ago | parent

I've been doing this as well. Though ubiquitous brand names die hard, like "kleenex" and "saran wrap".

sodapopcan 47 minutes ago | parent

I have no idea who owns the Kleenex and Saran Wrap brands and what they are like (I know it's a quick internet search away ;)), but they aren't using their products to track my every move, so it doesn't feel like it's as much of a problem.

vel0city 31 minutes ago | parent

Don't forget to stop saying Velcro and start using hook-and-loop fastener and interlocking slide fasteners instead of Zippers!

bitpush 50 minutes ago | parent

Fun fact - Companies dont like their product name becoming a verb.

bigyabai 48 minutes ago | parent

I'm going to have to see the statistics supporting this claim.

sodapopcan 45 minutes ago | parent

You could always do an, ahem, internet search to find out ;) There are examples out there.

mrdw 48 minutes ago | parent

source: trust me bro

sodapopcan 46 minutes ago | parent

Look up "Xerox sue over name use."

snapcaster 47 minutes ago | parent

companies are stupid then, because it's obviously good for them. You're maybe thinking about how trademark lawyers pursue use of it but that's for tactical reasons not because it isn't great marketing

WorldMaker 36 minutes ago | parent

Losing a trademark to a generic word can make marketing a lot harder, though. A company often needs a new brand then, because everyone else can use their old brand in the marketplace.

It would be fascinating for Alphabet to lose Google the brand to being a generic word. (To be fair, it is something that maybe should have happened already.) Kagi or DDG or someone could use a domain like google.new or google.tech to easily retrain old habits of some users. What is Alphabet going to do in that case? If Google is no longer a trademark but a generic word, do they focus on having the "Alphabet Brand Google" or "The Original Google, by Alphabet"? Either way, that's harder to market and maybe easier to build a fresh brand than fight the generic terminology.

iteria 7 minutes ago | parent

Someone tried to make them lose the trademark. They kept it in court because people literally mean search on Google when they say Google. They don't mean search in general. And that's fair, I don't say Google as a verb now that I use Kagi for search.

stldev 17 minutes ago | parent

Marketing teams kill for this. Every business wants this in the beginning. Once you're big enough that it threatens the trademark, the game changes.

Nales 48 minutes ago | parent

I have some triggers that make me stop reading or watching something. Using "google" as a verb is one of them. I perceive people doing that as blindly following a sort of cult, and I am not interested to learn anything from this kind of people.

Quothling 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

echelon 45 minutes ago | parent

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

asdfman123 46 minutes ago | parent

This site is just foreign state actor propaganda now. Regardless of how you feel about US tech monopolies, they're doing their best to undermine them.

sdcfgy 45 minutes ago | parent

Wiping tears away with my kleenex right now.

Analemma_ 43 minutes ago | parent

Even if this was true (it's not), it wouldn't make any difference to my actions. "What's good for GM is good for America" was false 70 years ago and has not become any less false in the intervening period.

asdfman123 24 minutes ago | parent

Maybe you could argue that we'd be better off with big tech, but foreign state actors have absolutely destroyed political discourse in the US. It's the reason why we all distrust each other and are sliding into autocracy.

Don't listen to them, they're not your friends. And if you listen to enough motivated reasoning, you'll lose track of what's true and what's not.

owebmaster 42 minutes ago | parent

> they're doing their best to undermine them.

Well... thanks?

nancyminusone 42 minutes ago | parent

What if I feel as though they deserve to be undermined?

kalleboo 17 minutes ago | parent

Nobody is pushing for Baidu or Yandex here

imhoguy 46 minutes ago | parent

Searching is dying. I mostly hear "ask Claude/ChatGPT" these days. Googling will most of the time result in wall of slop on the first page unless you search with the exact source or site hint.

andrewl-hn 42 minutes ago | parent

Around me people use the verb google for that, too: "I googled AI / GPT and it told me ..."

sdcfgy 46 minutes ago | parent

Been correcting my kids on this for the last 10 years. It works.

This was triggered by my mother Googling something on Bing.

semiquaver 46 minutes ago | parent

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!

tikhonj 46 minutes ago | parent

I guess if you use kagi, you can say "I'll kag it" instead

s0ar3k 45 minutes ago | parent

You could use the Andalusian Spanish word for looking up something, "bichear" :D

combobyte 44 minutes ago | parent

Happy to ditch Google, full stop.

serbuvlad 44 minutes ago | parent

I think this is focusing entirely on the wrong thing.

Non-Mac computers are still called "PC's", but IBM has nothing to gain from this. Similarly, copy machines at least in my country are called "Xerox's" but it's very rarely a machine from the Xerox company.

If you want to de-throne Google, you cannot do so by policing language. You have to build a better search (not more private! better!).

glerk 43 minutes ago | parent

I hear “ask GPT”/“ask Claude” much more often these days.

rplnt 43 minutes ago | parent

Searching for webpages, at least on google, have died like 10 years ago. Even if you knew the exact domain and words, it wouldn't be able to find it somehow. Always pushing "fresh results", changing your words (quotes or not), translating languages, etc... I tried to be smart and ruined everything that was good about it. On top of that web changed a lot and loads of content moved to private platforms. And now "AI".

Corence 41 minutes ago | parent

There's already articles saying younger people are already doing this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/magazine/google-it-search...

Telaneo 41 minutes ago | parent

Just google it with Bing.

It pains me that DuckDuckGo has the name that it has, since you can't even pretend to want to use that as a verb. You can use generic terms, and that's what I tend to do (usually just 'look it up (on the web)', alternativly 'search the web'), but there's good reason google entered the common lexicon and functionally replaced those terms, and finding a replacement that is as good is very, very hard.

klez 39 minutes ago | parent

> It pains me that DuckDuckGo has the name that it has, since you can't even pretend to want to use that as a verb

"DDG it" rolls off the tongue

Telaneo 37 minutes ago | parent

It absolutely does not. It's marginally better then the full word, but it's the same number of syllables.

kelseydh 37 minutes ago | parent

I have used DuckDuckGo for many years, and sadly over 75% of the time I find myself adding !g to the search to get the much better Google result. I'm not sure why I still bother with DuckDuckGo.

jmathai 36 minutes ago | parent

I'm not anti-Google by any means. But their products just aren't as essential in my life like they were 10 years ago. I'm not in the majority but ...

Google Photos -> Immich (better)

Google Search -> Claude (better)

Google Calendar -> Apple Calendar (better)

Google Chrome -> Safari or Firefox - someone please make a basic browser that can handle 30 tabs without needing gigs of memory

Google Maps -> .... I've been seeing if MapQuest is "good enough"

GMail -> .... I think Fastmail is "good enough" - GMail's bells and whistles aren't as important anymore

Cider9986 25 minutes ago | parent

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/

kalleboo 23 minutes ago | parent

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

advisedwang 5 minutes ago | parent

The kids where I tutored say "I searched it up"