Google as a verb
Jun. 8th, 2006 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramI was browsing through some old Usenet discussions, when I found this old post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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:
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