Hacker News Reader

Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

companies are stupid then, because it's obviously good for them. You're maybe thinking about how trademark lawyers pursue use of it but that's for tactical reasons not because it isn't great marketing

View on HN

Losing a trademark to a generic word can make marketing a lot harder, though. A company often needs a new brand then, because everyone else can use their old brand in the marketplace.

It would be fascinating for Alphabet to lose Google the brand to being a generic word. (To be fair, it is something that maybe should have happened already.) Kagi or DDG or someone could use a domain like google.new or google.tech to easily retrain old habits of some users. What is Alphabet going to do in that case? If Google is no longer a trademark but a generic word, do they focus on having the "Alphabet Brand Google" or "The Original Google, by Alphabet"? Either way, that's harder to market and maybe easier to build a fresh brand than fight the generic terminology.

Someone tried to make them lose the trademark. They kept it in court because people literally mean search on Google when they say Google. They don't mean search in general. And that's fair, I don't say Google as a verb now that I use Kagi for search.

I have and continued to say that "I googled it on the Bings". Some people have used it as the generic verb.

But "googling" it isn't really genericizing it. When people say "google it" they still almost always mean "search the internet using Google".

Does the average consumer use "google it" to mean "search with Bing"?

I know people that have used it that way in a while. Myself included: I certainly say that. I haven't intentionally used Google the search engine in years, but I use it at the generic term for an internet search.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com