Monday 21 October 2013

A small token of corporate language policy

The Swedish Språkråd (language board) have decided not to include the word "ogooglebar" (ungoogleable) in their list of new Swedish words due to a feud about it with Google. The Råd wanted to define it as "cannot be found through a search engine" but Google has apparently been hunting after usage of its name to signify search engines in general rather than Google in specific. They put their lawyers on the case to make the definition say "cannot be found through Google". The språkråd have expressed their disappoinment that Google tries to control the language in this way. 
Source: Onze taal magazine mei 2013 (free translation)

I thought this was interesting in line of the previous post on the way McDonalds and Apple control language use with regard to their products. I'm not entirely clear on why Google doesn't want its name to be used as a word for search engines in general though - surely it would be beneficial to them if people directly associate searching online with using Google. Opinions welcome.

No comments:

Post a Comment