According to the Seattle Times, Google is strongly objecting to the use of their company name as a verb, or synonym for search. For example, “I googled that new guy from work, he’s a member of NAMBLA.”

Why object to this type of use? If they fail to protect their trademark, competitors could argue that Google has become synonymous with search, a generic term. Theoretically, companies like Yahoo and MSN could then start using the term Google to describe their search services.

Don’t think it could happen? At one time, the term Escalator was a trademark of the Otis Elevator Company - link to wikipedia article. Westinghouse’s competing product was called “The Electric Stairway”. Because escalator became such a generic term, Otis Elevator lost the exclusive rights to Escalator in 1950.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, Random, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.