Eddie IzzardHave you seen that new show on FX starring Eddie Izzard (in men’s clothing!) and Minnie Driver? The show is called The Riches, and it’s about a family of Travelers (as in Irish Travelers) living in Louisiana.

I’ve seen two or three episodes now, and I haven’t decided if it’s worth my while. Last week I fell asleep about 15 minutes into it. Not a great sign.

Minnie DriverBut if you read the title of this post, you may have already realized that the post isn’t actually about a show on the eye of hell. Nope, it’s a post about Google. I just figured the pictures were more interesting that Google’s logo, especially since my last post had nine Technorati logos. But the show does enter into it. Trust me.

I’ve written before about the issue of trademarks and genericization of Google and other brand names. As Google indicated in their Do You Google blog post…

Here are some hopefully helpful examples.

Usage: ‘Google’ as noun referring to, well, us.
Example: “I just love Google, they’re soooo cute and cuddly and adorable and awesome!”
Our lawyers say: Good. Very, very good. There’s no question here that you’re referring to Google Inc. as a company. Use it widely, and hey, tell a friend.

Usage: ‘Google’ as verb referring to searching for information on, um, Google.
Example: “I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting.”
Our lawyers say: Well, we’re happy at least that it’s clear you mean searching on Google.com. As our friends at Merriam-Webster note, to “Google” means “to use the Google search engine to find information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.”

Usage: ‘Google’ as verb referring to searching for information via any conduit other than Google.
Example: “I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting.”
Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad. You can only “Google” on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to “search” on Yahoo or any other search engine.

OK, relevance time. I told you to trust me. When a program on the eye of hell shows a character doing a web search, they don’t use a real search engine. This is because of trademark and copyright issues. On Arrested Development, George Sr. searches for jetpants on a site called “InfoMole”. Well, in tonight’s episode of The Riches, a character runs an internet search on the name of some famous alpaca. The search engine he uses has a very generic name — something like “Internet Search”.

But in the next scene containing that character, he indicates that he ran the search while admonishing the protagonists by pointing out to them that we live in the age of Google. I don’t have a DVR, so I’m not claiming that’s an exact quote, but I’m pretty certain he didn’t use the word as a verb or as a generic term. He was referring to Google, Inc, in spite of the fact that we saw him use some other search engine. In other words, they chose not to use Google’s trademark for the visual, but they did use it in the dialogue.

Kind of odd.

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