Why Googling Instead of Yahooing?
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Recently, both Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary conferred on Google what many would consider a high honor. “To google” is no longer slang; it’s now an official word in the dictionary. But why did Google receive this distinction rather than some other search company? We take a look at some of the news and stories surrounding the search engine to try to answer that question.
You never hear anybody say they’re going to “yahoo” or “altavista” something. Both of these search engines have been around longer than Google, so you’d think they’d have a better chance of becoming words. Indeed, compared with the years listed for first usage of the other words Merriam-Webster is including this year, google is a newcomer. It dates to 2001, while the others date to the 1990s at the earliest. One of them – “wave pool” – is downright old in comparison, with a first usage dating to 1977. Dictionaries are inherently conservative, so why are they adopting “google,” and why so fast?
One obvious reason might be Google’s long shadow. It fields a more than respectable majority of the searches conducted throughout the world – even in languages other than English. Deutsche Welle noted that 70 percent of Germans go to Google first when looking for information online. This has some academics worried. Marcel Machill, a journalism professor at the Liepzig and Dortmund universities, noted that “In the classic media sector this kind of concentration would be unthinkable…It is important not to let this power develop unobserved.”
Google’s long shadow makes others call for government intervention. Norbert Schneider, director of the North Rhine Westphalia state media institute, describes Google’s self-imposed filtering of search results to comply with a country’s local laws as a “weak regulation without any sanctions,” and thinks the government needs to step in to make sure users understand the power of search engines. As for Machill, he thinks a European search engine, started with public funds, is needed to counter balance the pre-eminence of Google (and other US search engines).
Certainly its reach – which is enough to scare many people – is one reason Google became a verb. And the controversy surrounding the search engine probably helps too. Let’s take a brief look at what Google has done to build up its power and reach.
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