The local young person here likes to say, "search it up!"
Which I find amusing for reasons not completely understood. Either way, better than giving free advertising to a multinational spying firm.
Yeah, I used to Google things until Google went to shit. Now I use Kagi, but it doesn't sound like a verb. I'll gladly add "search [it] up" to my lexicon :)
The term 'google' does a good job of saying 'internet search' with far fewer letters, and with much more uniqueness. That alone helped in the battle with 'Dog Pile' and Alta Vista.
I've never got into turning business names into verbs, and I am from the generation that heavily used "Google it".
Nowadays, I have colleagues suggest to "Ask Claude/ChatGPT". I want to collaborate and build on the team experience, not ask a system that can hallucinate an answer!
Can you give an example of a question that you would google, but your colleagues would "Ask Claude" and they get a hallucination but you get the right answer?
Pretty much anything to do with transportation routes — it keeps telling me to take a non-existent train line, or a bus that isn’t on the schedule it thinks, or something like that.
Maybe "google it" can refer to the uglified nature of English usage by conflating an activity with a morally ambiguous entity who eventually and inevitably enshittifies it.
Funnily enough, I was considering writing a blog post on this very subject yesterday - none of my kids ever mentions Google at all, and even their friends who have Android phones use "search it up".
In Finnish there is an acronym KVG (katso vittu Googlesta) which stands roughly for Look up on the fucking Google. I wonder what will replace it in the age of LLMs
I still say "Google it", but I don't use Google for search anymore -- haven't for almost two years, ever since I started subscribing to Kagi. If you're busting my ass about how I use "Google" as a verb, and you're still actually using Google to search, you can help yourself to a heaping serving of Shut The ** Up.
But since I also like to quack it with Duck Duck Go, daddy-o, I sometimes just say " I used a search engine..."