"This" being the time – in "Help", Season 7, Episode 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – when "google" was first used as a verb on TV.
In this episode, the Scooby gang investigate a girl named Cassie Newton, who tells them she's going to die. They find sad poetry on her website, and Buffy thinks it's indicative of some kind of precognitive talent but the others aren't so sure. And then – actually you need to go on Netflix or wherever: It's a great and heartbreaking episode.
ANYWAY. As the Atlantic has explained, this fact was first reported by Charles Arthur in his book Digital Wars.
The Atlantic reported:
According to Arthur, just a few months [after the show was broadcast], all 60 members of a committee selected by the American Dialect Society voted to google 2002's most useful new word. Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary would soon note the coinage. By 2006, Google's lawyers — fearful of seeing the company's name brand watered down to the trademark mushiness of kleenex — wrote a post for the company blog outlining when and when not to google should be used.
And as UsVsTh3m points out, "Google as a company was four years old in 2002, and was already the largest search engine in the world. So in many ways it's quite surprising that this happened so late."
Here's an excellent bonus.
That means it's now all but gone: but an UsVsTh3m reader has found what's left here.
