~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?
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.