Google as a verb

[avram]

I was browsing through some old Usenet discussions, when I found this old post by nancylebov using “google” as a verb on 17 July 2000 back when it was still a relatively new coinage (though I’d used it two weeks earlier in the same thread).

This got me wondering just what the first usage was. I figured, hey, I just might be the first person to have ever used it in public writing. I could be famous! Wikipedia tells us that “[t]he American Dialect Society chose the verb to google as the ‘most useful word of 2002’” and provides no earlier citations. (I ought to do something about that.) So I (of course) googled through Google’s Usenet archive, first for the word pair google and verb, then for googled. I used 1 Jan 1996 as my starting cut-off, since Google was founded that month.

Making my life more complicated were people using “googled” to describe being amazed. It’s also a term in rugby. But the earliest unambiguous instance was this 24 Nov 1999 post to the muc.lists.freebsd.mobile group by Dirk-Willem van Gulik:

From: Dirk-Willem van Gulik
Date: Wed, Nov 24 1999 12:00 am
 
On 24 Nov 1999, Matt Braithwaite wrote: 

> On Wed, 24 Nov 1999 12:09:08 -0800, Randy Bush <r...@psg.com> said: 
> > i just run userland ppp and it cooks 

> Not that it's especially relevant, but:  is anybody interested in 
> running STRIP under FreeBSD?  I ported the NetBSD driver and it's been 
> working fine for me. 

Actually this is kind of neat. I am in italy; and have just one of those 
beasts... for use in the US. But this would be a hack to do something 
usefull with them here as well when I get a second one. 
Any specific pointer's for the freebsd code ; I just googled; but got 
mainly linux/netbsd specific ptr's. 

Dw

Comments

[pavel-lishin.livejournal.com]

Damn; that's a pretty long time ago. I was still in high school.