During one of my classes this semester, the professor expounded on some of the characters from a case and suggested that a student might want to search the web to verify a factoid. One of my classmates in front of me quickly raised their hand and said “I’ll google it.” That classmate then opened up their My Yahoo! page, entered their search term, and quickly came back with the answer.
Stories like this probably scare the hell out of Google‘s attorneys. Enough so that they posted to the Google Blog back in October asking people not to use Google as a verb. It is also a good reason why Wall Street shouldn’t throw the towel in for Yahoo! just yet.
BTW: That isn’t the first time or the first person I’ve seen say they googled something while using Y! Search.