It’s a symptom of a problem, not the source of it. It’s great that it happens, because if it happens enough, Google might lose the trademark

It’s not the first time — plenty of people still use “Xerox” to mean copy even if they obviously are not referring to a machine made by Xerox

It's normal that brand names become widely used synonyms for basic activities. Just one example would be this one: In german ppl call adhesive tape "tixo" like the company producing it. So before we abolish capitalism this problem will keep on existing.

I am trying not to use those words but even though i'm using DuckDuckgGo, "Googling smth" is just so widely used, it's too hard to stop using it and it'd also be kinda useless to do so, like what am I going to achieve there?

Fun fact: when the verb "to google" came into existence, Google was against it because they weren't yet the monopoly they are now and they feared that using the term for other search engines would undermine their importance.

I use the term even though I use other search engines

Imo it’s a reflex at this point. Like some people say “can you pass me a Kleenex” instead of “can you pass me a tissue” and like 99% of people call it a Taser instead of… idek what it’s called. Even Escalator and Kerosene were once Trademarked, but with enough use by normal people, they can lose it to a process called genericization (the process of becoming Generic). Hopefully Google™️ loses its trademark because they’re pretty fucked up

Its problematic for google.

It is, just as so many brand names have become the colloquial term for a thing.

You have a point, but sometimes you gotta choose your battles.

In fact it can hurt Google if their trademark term develops a generic or nonspecific meaning. So dating "Google it" and then linking to ddg might be the best thing you could do.

just yesterday i was watching a Danganronpa (someone posts a lot about it around here so i got curious lol) playthrough in youtube and one of the characters in the game said "just google it". This is a game released like 15 years ago.

It kind of sucks because there are many other search engines and google has been getting worse and worse. Maybe it was always like this but nowadays i feel like every website in the front page of google is straight up written by an AI.

nah, this is great. it's the reverse of the enclosure of the commons.

For a couple of years I tried to say "look it up" instead, but now I've accepted my defeat and I say "that's interesting, let me google it" as I type the query into DDG