Gary Price reports Google, the verb, was the second most popular word in Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year survey that just came out.

Merriam-Webster published the top ten words over here. The top word is “truthiness” by Stephen Colbert.

I wonder how Google is feeling about this given efforts this year to get people not to use Google as a word.

Answer? They don’t have a problem, since the definition is about doing a search on Google itself. From a recent blog post at Google:

Usage: ‘Google’ as verb referring to searching for information on, um, Google.

Example: “I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting.”

Our lawyers say: Well, we’re happy at least that it’s clear you mean searching on Google.com. As our friends at Merriam-Webster note, to “Google” means “to use the Google search engine to find information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.”

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: General | Search & Society: General

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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