The verb “Google” refers to the action of looking something up on the eponymous search engine—and it made its pop culture debut in 2002 during the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Xander, a goofball 21-year-old, mistakes tech geek Willow’s research suggestion (“Have you Googled her yet?”) to slayer Buffy as an innuendo.
Since then, Googling has come a long way from being a punch line in a supernatural teen drama. Google co-founder Larry Page first coined the verb two months before the company’s founding, when he updated friends on the company in an email and signed off with “Have fun and keep googling!” The term was minted in the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2006, and since then, the neologism has become synonymous with using a search engine. But not anymore. Today’s teens are seldom using Google as a verb, according to Bernstein Research, and it’s a sign they’ve fundamentally changed how they interact with the internet.
