The first recorded usage of google used as a gerund, thus supposing an intransitive verb, was on July 8, 1998, by Google co-founder Larry Page himself, who wrote on a mailing list: "Have fun and keep googling!". Its earliest known use on American television was in the "Help" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when Willow asked Buffy, "Have you googled her yet?" On February 23, 2003, Google sent a cease and desist letter to Paul McFedries, creator of Word Spy, a website that tracks neologisms. In an article in the Washington Post, Frank Ahrens discussed the letter he received from a Google lawyer that demonstrated "appropriate" and "inappropriate" ways to use the verb "google". It was reported that, in response to this concern, lexicographers for the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary lowercased the actual entry for the word, google, while maintaining the capitalization of the search engine in their definition, "to use the Google search engine to seek online information". On October 25, 2006, Google sent a request to the public requesting that "You should please only use 'Google' when you're actually referring to Google Inc. and our services."
Ungoogleable
Ungoogleable is something that cannot be "googled" i.e. it cannot be found easily using the Google Searchweb search engine or any web search engine. In 2013 the Swedish Language Council attempted to include the Swedish version of the word in its list of new words, but Google objected to the definition not being specifically related to Google, and the Council was forced to briefly remove it to avoid a legal confrontation with Google.
Causes
Google Search generally ignores punctuation and letter case even when using the "quotation" operator to denote exact searches. Thus, Google may not be able to differentiate terms for which punctuation impacts meaningfor example, "man eating chicken" and "man-eating chicken". Because Google treats upper and lower case letters as one and the same, it also is unable to differentiate between the pronoun he and the surname He, which, when combined with its disregard for punctuation, could bury results for an obscure person named "Thomas He" among results such as:
... Assisted by Thomas, he was able to provide incontrovertible proof of this theory, and in so doing, he gained wide recognition in the medical...
The above also exemplifies how Google's PageRank algorithm, which sorts results by "importance", could also cause something to become ungoogleable: results for those with the 17th most common Chinese surname are difficult to separate from results containing the 16thmost common word in English. In other words, a specific subject may be ungoogleable because its results are a of results for a more "important" term. Websites in the deep web are ungoogleable because they cannot be detected by traditional search engines.
