by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com Copyright © 2002 Richard Seltzer
All rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.
This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WOTW 900 AM, Nashua, NH 12-2 PM Sundays.
Over the weekend, my wife and I went to see the latest Jennifer Lopez movie -- "Maid in Manhattan," a well-advertised mildly-entertaining piece of fluff.
At one point in the movie, Jennifer's son, age ten, has a question that she can't answer, and she replies matter-of-factly, "Google it."
They are walking up a New York City street. The mother, an underprivileged Hispanic, who works as a maid in Manhattan, has lived within a four-block radius in the Bronx all her life. Presumably, she never went to college. The theme of the movie contrasts her life style and that of the very privileged future US senator (son of a US senator) who falls in love with her. It's a modern Cinderella story, reminiscent of Flash Dance, except in Flash Dance the Cinderella had talent and had to prove she had talent to achieve her dream. In this case, Jennifer Lopez just has to be gorgeous.
But this stereotypically underprivileged person has seen the Web and Google, or used them or heard about them so often that she takes their capabilities for granted, as a normal part of her life and her son's life.
When she uses the expression "google it", no other explanation is required either for her son or for the movie-going audience. There's no mention of the Internet or search -- all of that is implied in the newly-coined verb "google". No big deal. To me the fact that that is not a big deal to characters of this kind in this kind of a movie is a very big deal indeed. To me that signifies that the Web has gone completely mainstream, that it is not just high-tech that we read about and hear about everywhere, but rather is an ordinary expected part of our daily lives, that we depend on it and take it for granted like refrigerators and stoves and microwaves and televisions.
The ten-year-old kid is shown to be bright when by chance he happens to be in an elevator with a New York state assemblyman who wants to run for the US Senate. The kid knows the candidate's voting record on environmental issues and makes some intelligent observations. The assemblyman's overzealous idiot assistant is shocked that the kid knows so much. But the assemblyman and the kid both take it for granted that all that info is readily accessible by all on the Web. Smart people know that and use that capability, regardless of their wealth, education, or background. Only fools don't.
To me this movie marks a stage in Internet history, somewhat like the cartoon in the New Yorker, back in July 1993, that showed two dogs looking at a computer monitor, and the one dog said to the other, "On the Internet, no one knows that you're a dog." That was then followed by the first appearances of URLs and email addresses on billboards and in radio and TV ads; and the first intelligent use of the Internet as a plot element in a high-tech popular movie with Sandra Bullock in "The Net," then the first use of the Internet as a plot device in a romantic comedy with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in "You've Got Mail." But in both those movies, and their imitators, the writers and directors felt it necessary to explain the technology. The people who used the technology were early adopters, a cut above the ordinary. You never see a computer in "Maid in Manhattan" (or at least I didn't notice one). In the other movies, computers were everywhere, and, in all probability, computer manufacturers paid the studios to have their equipment prominent displayed, as has been the case since the early days of PCs. Now it's a different ballgame. Computers and the Internet aren't just a part of the everyday office environment, the Internet and Google in particular have become an ordinary part of the English language -- not just how we do business, but how we think, how we deal with our children and with the complex world we live in.
Google, like frigidaire, scotch tape, post-it, and xerox has become so pervasive, so well known, that the brand name is used as an ordinary word. The brand name has become so successful that the trademark is at risk. The other words reached that status in large part because of massive advertising campaigns. I've never seen an ad for Google.
The other brands became household words because those products were the first of their kind, or at least the first to be widely used. But Google wasn't the first Internet search engine -- far from it. Infoseek and Excite and Lycos were on the scene much earlier. Then they were pushed to the side by AltaVista, which dominated for a while with the advanced hardware and financial backing and the national and international advertising of Digital and then Compaq. But with that backing also came enormous corporate inertia and old economy thinking that held AltaVista back and dragged it in unnatural directions.
Google, which came on the scene late and started as a university research project with little funding, focused on search and just search, and continued to do so over the years, without being seduced into trying to become a general-purpose portal with fancy graphics and dozens of different applications. It grew by word of mouth, not by advertising; by providing an excellent, unbiased, all-inclusive, easy-to-use Web search service, not by making claims on television. And it is now so dominantly popular that not Lycos, not Excite, not AltaVista, all of which advertised heavily and loaded their home pages with flash and irrelevancies, but rather the late-comer Google, with its simple and direct approach has become the household word, synonymous with Internet search, almost synonymous with the Web itself.
And their tradition continues. Shortly before the Christmas shopping season, Google launched a new Web site called "Froogle", which focuses on product search for shoppers. Instead of adding this service to the Google site and cluttering it, taking it away from its core strength, they made a separate site. They didn't even add an ad or even a link from the Google site -- keeping that site as clean and simple as it was before. Over the last few weeks, I've seen no ads for the Froogle site either -- whether in print or on the Web. Rather they relied on providing a quality free service and backing it with good public relations. As a result, over the last few weeks, I've seen dozens of mentions of Froogle in on-line and print magazines, and have received email from a dozen friends suggesting that I give it a try. Word of mouth based on quality, not advertising, wins in the new business environment.
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