google

verb

goo·gle ˈgü-gəl

variants or Google

googled or Googled; googling ˈgü-g(ə-)liŋ

or Googling; googles or Googles

transitive verb

: to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (someone or something) on the World Wide Web

googleable

ˈgü-gə-lə-bəl

adjective

or Googleable

The Massachusetts trio may not have picked an easily Googleable name … —

Leah Greenblatt

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Google vs. Googol

The verb google and the noun googol are commonly confused because they have similar pronunciations. Google is the word that is more common to us now, and so it is sometimes mistakenly used as a noun to refer to the number 10¹⁰⁰. That number is a googol, so named by Milton Sirotta, the nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner, who was working with large numbers like 10¹⁰⁰. Google, on the other hand, is the name of a search engine as well as a verb that refers to searching the Internet using the Google search engine. (The search engine’s name was inspired by the number: the founders of Google chose the name to reflect their mission “to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.”) You can remember that the number is spelled googol by remembering that a googol has lots of o’s.

Two related words, googolplex and googleplex, are also commonly confused. A googolplex is the number 1 followed by a googol of zeros; the Googleplex is the Mountain View, California headquarters of Google.

Examples of google in a Sentence

Then where are they going, if not to Faulkner and Achebe and Naipaul? … To the movies; to television (hours and hours); to Googling obsessively (hours and hours); to blogging and emailing and text messaging … —

Cynthia Ozick, Harper's, April 2007

The Sports Gal and I delayed dinner plans so I could analyze the replays like a police chief. Eventually she realized we weren't leaving the house, so she made herself a sandwich and headed upstairs to Google divorce lawyers. —

Bill Simmons, ESPN, 6 Dec. 2004

Have you ever googled yourself, maybe late at night, when nobody else was around? It's OK, you can admit it—everybody does it. —

Tom Maurstad, Dallas Morning News, 17 Apr. 2004

Recent Examples on the Web So then the very hungry caterpillar becomes the very Googling caterpillar—Googling and Googling all of his symptoms until his little legs fall off from Googling so much. —

Kathryn Kvas, The New Yorker, 21 Nov. 2023 The man googled the guitar and found a video of a musician playing the same guitar in a nightclub in Japan. —

Peter Larsen, San Diego Union-Tribune, 3 Nov. 2023 This means Googling when the shoulder season begins and ends in your preferred destination. —

Stacey Leasca, Travel + Leisure, 11 Oct. 2023 Approximately 31 minutes later, everyone in the audience was furiously Googling José Condessa, Jason Fernández, Manu Ríos, and George Steane. —

Vulture, 4 Oct. 2023 Become a Subscriber My fear was that Dumb Money would resemble a dramatized Wikipedia page, explaining the technical details of a news story that viewers can just Google themselves. —

David Sims, The Atlantic, 22 Sep. 2023 Unfortunately, though Googling cannabis will return thousands of hits about the health benefits of cannabis, many of these claims aren’t supported by scientific research. —

Beth Cohen, University Of California, Discover Magazine, 4 Sep. 2023 If something feels off to you, trust your gut and do additional research, like Googling the person’s name and the product and seeing what that search yields, Games suggests. —

Time, 24 Aug. 2023 The committee noted that the course had identified learning goals, but not competencies, and students could simply Google the answers to complete the course’s one and only assessment. —

Steven Porter, BostonGlobe.com, 9 Aug. 2023 See More

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'google.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.