“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was the first TV show to use “Google” as a verb.
On October 15, 2002, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did something no U.S. TV show had ever done before: use the word “Google” as a verb. The moment came in “Help,” the fourth episode of the show’s seventh and final season, when Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) discussed a student with psychic powers and Willow asked, “Have you Googled her yet?” In typical Buffy fashion, that query was met with humorous misunderstanding from Xander (Nicholas Brendon): “Willow, she’s 17.” Willow then informed him that Google was a search engine — a clarification that isn’t exactly necessary anymore.
Though it may sound counterintuitive, companies tend to be unhappy when their names are used this way. A brand name becoming so ubiquitous that it turns into a generic word for a product — think Kleenex, Band-Aid, and even Velcro — is called genericization, which in extreme cases can lead to the company losing its trademark. In legal terms, this is known as genericide. Google was well aware of this risk, and even went so far as to write a blog post about it in 2006: “We’d like to make clear that you should please only use ‘Google’ when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services.” Their efforts have thus far been successful, with Google remaining a protected trademark.
It’s called Buffy studies, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a scholarly examination of the beloved TV series, whose influence and legacy have only grown since it went off the air in 2003. Few shows were taken seriously as works of art when Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered in 1997, two years before The Sopranos ushered in what’s often called the Golden Age of Television — making the hundreds of academic papers devoted to the cult classic all the more remarkable. In addition to library guides and books, the show has even been the subject of college courses.
