Criminal IT: On Google and googling

The dangers of becoming generic...

When you walk mud onto the carpet, do you hoover it up? And do you cling film your leftover food or do you put it in a tupperware pot? Would you xerox a sheet of paper that you'd printed off from your PC, and blue-tack it on the wall? More importantly, if you wanted to know what other things I've written on the web, would you google my name?

The point, of course, is the way that successful brand names run the risk of becoming generics. The brand name becomes synonymous with the solution, so that I hoover with a Dyson, cling film with 'All Purpose Cling Film' from my local supermarket, blue-tack with sticky stuff from the newsagent, and haven't a clue who made my photocopier though I know it wasn't Xerox.

But of course, like more than half of the users of the web, I still google with Google - though the company must be starting to get a little concerned about protecting that brand name.

Corporate history is littered with specific names that have come to be so closely associated with the activity, solution or service that few now remember there ever was a brand name associated with them. Hoover is perhaps the best known of these victims of their own success.

And protecting the brand name is, I would argue, as important a part of information security - or at least, of information risk-management - as any other part of the activity. Companies need to know just how their brand names are being treated and used.

This is particularly important in the accelerated context of the internet, where blogs and online news services can introduce new usages and change old ones at the speed of light - in this case, by following that old American adage: 'There ain't no noun that can't be verbed!'

When a firm's brand name becomes a generic, their advertising efforts, their research and development, their corporate management, everything about their company inevitably ends up pushing the general solution rather than their own. And equally - as the owners of Viagra discovered with spam - things which undermine the reputation of the generic equally undermine the reputation of the brand itself. This is, of course, doubly true for the unfortunate manufacturers of the processed meat product made by Hormel and called Spam.

It could be argued that, just as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, generics are the true mark of market penetration - but that is small comfort to a company that loses its unique and carefully-protected brand name and individual recognition.

You can bet the Google lawyers are closely watching the way that 'to google' is being used as a generic in a variety of different ways. And perhaps, since the father of cyber-punk himself, William Gibson, has used the term as a generic in his latest book, Pattern Recognition, those lawyers might have something of an uphill battle on their hands.

But of course Google is on something of a tricky ground concerning the name of their company. The story is that the name was chosen to remind us of the Googol - a 1 followed by 100 zeroes, supposedly to represent the vast and growing number of links in the web, though in reality reminding most of us of the 'coughing Major' on Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Actually, I've always wondered about that Googol association - especially since the spelling is different, and more especially because I actually possess something called The Google Book.

Published in 1913, it is a collection of bizarre drawings of imaginary birds along with whimsical poems to describe them and the Google, a fearsome creature who tries to catch those birds in his garden, 'far, far away... in a land which only children can go to'.

It was written by Vincent Cartwright Vickers, son of the founder of Vickers Aerospace (as it is now, Vickers Armstrong as it was then). An economist, former director of the Bank of England and a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society, it seems odd that Vickers should have written such a strange and frankly disturbingly twee book, full of rhymes like 'Have you seen the Lemon squeezer, feeding Herbert and Louisa?' and pen-and-ink drawings of unsurpassable nastiness. A book long overdue its final trip to the great car boot sale in the sky.

There is, of course, no possibility of confusion between Google the search engine and Google the weird bird-eating creature from a distant land imagined by a retired economist. And naturally, the use of the term 'to google' rather than 'to yahoo' does show quite clearly that the Google search engine has become the dominant player in that market, allowing them to introduce a vast array of related services.

On the internet, it is difficult to see what other, similar brand names are at risk of becoming generics - though if Microsoft weren't so dominant, the use of the term 'windows' for panes on the computer screen might lead to some interesting arguments. But other terms aren't in the same category: internet was never a brand name, for example, and though PC was a part of the brand name 'IBM PC', it was used as shorthand for a single person computer for many years before that.

So, only Google currently seems to be at risk of the great generic problem - and I for one intend to keep on saying that 'I am searching Google' rather than 'I am googling the answer'. Especially since there now seems to be a problem with the esteemed Mr Vickers' nasty book, since tracking it down through Google itself seems all but impossible. Has Google swallowed the Google?