The verb “Google” refers to the action of looking something up on the eponymous search engine—and it made its pop culture debut in 2002 during the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Xander, a goofball 21-year-old, mistakes tech geek Willow’s research suggestion (“Have you Googled her yet?”) to slayer Buffy as an innuendo.
Since then, Googling has come a long way from being a punch line in a supernatural teen drama. Google co-founder Larry Page first coined the verb two months before the company’s founding, when he updated friends on the company in an email and signed off with “Have fun and keep googling!” The term was minted in the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2006, and since then, the neologism has become synonymous with using a search engine. But not anymore. Today’s teens are seldom using Google as a verb, according to Bernstein Research, and it’s a sign they’ve fundamentally changed how they interact with the internet.
“Younger audiences are ‘searching’, not ‘Googling’,” Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik and colleagues said in a note published Friday. “And they increasingly head to social media like TikTok for restaurant recommendations, directly to scaled aggregators like Amazon for retail, and Generative AI search like ChatGPT to get their homework done.”
Bernstein, using an April 2024 survey by Forbes Advisor and Talker Research of 2,000 Americans, noted that 45% of Gen Z are more likely to use “social searching” on sites like TikTok and Instagram instead of Google. That’s compared to about 35% of millennials, 20% of Gen X, and less than 10% of Boomers. Even as Gen Z grows older, they’ve increasingly relied on social media as their primary search engine.
“Gen Zers have also grown up in a relatively mature Internet,” Shmulik said in the note. “It’s second nature for these users to go direct to the source…This world isn’t big and scary, it’s just home for Gen Z.”
For the young generation, social media platforms have become a way to look up what to buy, where to eat, and how to spend their time. About 40% of Gen Z said they used social media as a primary search engine for brands, products and services in 2016, and almost 52% said the same in 2023, according to data from GWI Core.
Social media sites like Instagram and TikTok have responded to Gen Z’s prolific searching for things to buy online with their own e-commerce platforms and tailored ads, making $11 billion in U.S. ad revenue from minors alone in 2023. Even more mouth watering is Gen Z’s spending power, predicted to swell to $12 trillion by 2023, according to NielsonIQ’s “Spend Z” report. Gen Alpha, the iPad kid generation, is hot on their heels, already spending over two hours a week online shopping.
Google is sooo last decade
But while social media sites have begun to capitalize on Gen Z’s proclivity for scrolling and searching, Google has another problem with which to contend.
“Something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, said during Fortune’s 2022 Brainstorm Tech conference, referencing internal company data. “They go to TikTok or Instagram.”
Google’s search engine woes are compounded by its recent antitrust lawsuit loss in which a federal judge ruled the tech giant monopolized the search market. Google’s parent company Alphabet paid $26 billion to be the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers, effectively preventing competing search engines from succeeding in the market.
As far as Gen Z is concerned, Google has already made changes, given that young people are attracted to pictures and videos, which contrast heavily with older generations’ search habits of looking up key phrases and clicking a link that best corresponds with those terms.
“The journey begins in different forms than before: visual image forms,” Raghavan said.
Google has since invested in technology to address this, including augmented reality glasses with “multi search” features allowing users to use both images and text to search online, and includes a “near me” feature to find products, stores, and services local to users. The company is testing an Ask Photos feature that uses its Gemini AI models to answer questions about information in a user’s photo, like the restaurant at which they ate or last time they visited a particular location.
“We have to conjure up completely new expectations and that takes altogether new…technology underpinnings,” Raghavan said.
Google did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
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