“Search” started describing internet exploration near the end of the last century. The word had moved from signifying literal seeking-and-finding to something more abstract: whatever happens when we put words into an interface that, after launching automated web crawlers, spits out a page of results in a fraction of a second. “Search,” in the old sense of the word, has little to do with a process like this; it’s no wonder we sought out a new term for it.

So we came to Googling, which Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary added to their pages as a verb in 2006. (It had already been named the “most useful world of the year” by the American Dialect Society in 2002, in a year-end collection that also included “weapons of mass destruction” and “blog.”) The first person known to use the proper noun as a verb was the Google co-founder Larry Page himself, in a 1998 signoff on a listserv: “Have fun and keep googling!” In later years, though, the company discouraged the use of “Google” as a verb for trademark reasons, worrying that it would be a victim of “genericide.” Too bad for them: We kept “Googling it.”

So why are young people abandoning the word now? Part of this shift follows a typical pattern from a branded term to a generic one. The Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen told me this change reminded her of how “Kleenex” used to be a stand-in for tissue, “Frigidaire” for refrigerator or “Levi’s” for all blue jeans. Over time, either because competitors unseated these innovators or because the novelty wore off, people switched back to the common words. “It strikes me that at the time when we started saying ‘Google it,’ Google was ‘it,’” Tannen said; other search engines like Ask Jeeves became the butts of jokes.

And in the age of Claude and ChatGPT, the old-school search engine is both less novel and less impressive. Carson, the 11-year-old, is part of a generation for whom Google is just a fact of life. “When the adults were kids, they didn’t really have Google,” she told me, “but now that we’re kids it’s more normal.” Even if young people like her choose to type their question into Google, they would be much more likely to read the Gemini summaries that Google’s own large language model spits out than to sift through the list of linked results. This shift has affected web traffic globally and has turned “search” into an action that is less and less about browsing and weighing different options from a compendium of human knowledge indexed for our own use.

Today “searching it up” via L.L.M. seems more like speaking with an oracle. (Another new phrase, “Ask ChatGPT,” emphasizes this weird deference to this nonhuman entity: We’re not searching at all but asking.) Whereas Google produced a mountain of possible answers, when you type a query into an L.L.M., you just get a single cohesive answer: a pastiche of all the results it has already trawled and compressed into a smooth-voiced mash-up.