~10 years ago I would say “google it” often. But now I don’t think I say that at all, and would say “search for it” or similar.
I don’t think I really consciously decided to stop saying it, but I suppose it just felt weird to explicitly refer to one search engine while using another.
Just me? Do you say, or hear others say, “google it” in $current_year? Is it different for techies and normies?
It is weird to observe younger generations using search engines with how they treat them as some sort of fully natural language processing butlers.
Where you or I might formulate a query as: “films famous within Italy” or simply “famous Italian films”
Gen alpha will generally conduct that same search as: “What are the movies that are most famous in Italy?”
Does it give a different result? I think it doesn’t matter. In that case it might be more natural to speak in full sentences for those who never had the need to be specific and concise to a search engine. Because there used to be a need to be specific and concise to have the search engine give you a good result. Now it’s so heavily optimised and commercialised, it doesn’t really matter what you input.
I think it used to, the way I search as a netizen for 20 years is definitely more of a “keyword” style like the original commenter mentioned, but that comes down to how I became “trained” to search as a lot of the unnecessary words used to make the results less accurate in my experience. I think search engines have gotten better at figuring out what the root of the request is, while also serving up more crap in general due to SEO gaming.