I have Googled thousands of things in my life. Probably hundreds of thousands. In fact, I am willing to bet I am a power Googler, engaged in a kind of continuous conversation with the search engine about all manner of questions and concerns and interests: “what happened to pippa middleton,” “weird rash on chin not itching,” “quarterly tax new york state address,” “if I have googled five things a day for 15 years how much have I googled” and so forth. My Google search bar feels sometimes like an extension of my mind, the place my idle thoughts get typed in, only to generate hundreds of thousands of new pathways for me to explore. “To Google” might be one of my most-used verbs.
But the kids these days — Gen Z and Alpha — aren’t talking about Googling things. They may still be using Google, but they’re not “Googling it.” Instead they’re saying “search it up,” as in: Who is that Norwegian soccer player with the long blond hair? Search it up. The “it” is dropped if you have a direct object, as when you “search up Erling Haaland.”
The shift toward using this phrasal verb has been profound in the youngest generations. A few years ago, a podcast called “A Way With Words” interviewed a 13-year-old who described how all her friends were using the term; one of the hosts posited that “search up” was being used by “zillions of people.” (There is even a PBS KIDS mini-series, which started in 2020, called “Search It Up!”) The other day, I spoke to an 11-year-old named Carson, who told me she uses the phrase exclusively. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of my friends say, ‘I Googled it,’” she said.
The phrase “search up” was added to the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Thesaurus only in 2024, but it did appear in pre-internet times, with a first mention in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1529. One example sentence from 1780: “He searched up all the Hebrew copies he was able, and burnt them.” Many of the older terms describing the act of research had a foot in the physical world: “look up,” “browse” and “peruse” all conjure a literal sense of moving through sources in search of information.
“Search” started describing internet exploration near the end of the last century. The word had moved from signifying literal seeking-and-finding to something more abstract: whatever happens when we put words into an interface that, after launching automated web crawlers, spits out a page of results in a fraction of a second. “Search,” in the old sense of the word, has little to do with a process like this; it’s no wonder we sought out a new term for it.
So we came to Googling, which Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary added to their pages as a verb in 2006. (It had already been named the “most useful world of the year” by the American Dialect Society in 2002, in a year-end collection that also included “weapons of mass destruction” and “blog.”) The first person known to use the proper noun as a verb was the Google co-founder Larry Page himself, in a 1998 signoff on a listserv: “Have fun and keep googling!” In later years, though, the company discouraged the use of “Google” as a verb for trademark reasons, worrying that it would be a victim of “genericide.” Too bad for them: We kept “Googling it.”
So why are young people abandoning the word now? Part of this shift follows a typical pattern from a branded term to a generic one. The Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen told me this change reminded her of how “Kleenex” used to be a stand-in for tissue, “Frigidaire” for refrigerator or “Levi’s” for all blue jeans. Over time, either because competitors unseated these innovators or because the novelty wore off, people switched back to the common words. “It strikes me that at the time when we started saying ‘Google it,’ Google was ‘it,’” Tannen said; other search engines like Ask Jeeves became the butts of jokes.
And in the age of Claude and ChatGPT, the old-school search engine is both less novel and less impressive. Carson, the 11-year-old, is part of a generation for whom Google is just a fact of life. “When the adults were kids, they didn’t really have Google,” she told me, “but now that we’re kids it’s more normal.” Even if young people like her choose to type their question into Google, they would be much more likely to read the Gemini summaries that Google’s own large language model spits out than to sift through the list of linked results. This shift has affected web traffic globally and has turned “search” into an action that is less and less about browsing and weighing different options from a compendium of human knowledge indexed for our own use.
Today “searching it up” via L.L.M. seems more like speaking with an oracle. (Another new phrase, “Ask ChatGPT,” emphasizes this weird deference to this nonhuman entity: We’re not searching at all but asking.) Whereas Google produced a mountain of possible answers, when you type a query into an L.L.M., you just get a single cohesive answer: a pastiche of all the results it has already trawled and compressed into a smooth-voiced mash-up.
Google’s functional monopoly on search had plenty of negative effects on the internet, so it’s hard to mourn its decline wholeheartedly. But as a mode of looking things up, I love Googling. It feels like wandering in an infinite library. Searching something up with a chatbot leads immediately to a conclusion: The journey happens without you, and the answer simply arrives. The search is over, almost as soon as it began.
Sophie Haigney is working on a book about our obsession with collecting objects, from priceless fossils to plastic Power Rangers.
The post Saying ‘Google It’ Makes You Sound Old. ‘Search It Up’ Instead. appeared first on New York Times.
