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Part One

Part one is here, and cites references and dates about the verb ‘to google’, and asks about the syllabification and spelling of googl(e)able.

Part Two

This was originally my second question, but I think it deserves a whole post of its own, and users may be more interested in its history than in its pronunciation and orthography.

Q. When was googleable or googlable first used?

So far I have unearthed the following citations

Googleable (2006)

"But, still curious about why anyone, let alone his father, would want to read Quinn Scott's biography, he began searching for more information on the other members of the family; people who retained or created their fame during the computer age, and were therefore far more Googleable."
When the Stars Come Out

googlable (2005)

I actually “found” Andrew through google search in 2003, when I was searching for alternatives to EM. Therefore I should also thank Andrew for the “googlable” website he built, which brought us to work together, and the collaboration turned out to be such an enjoyable experience.

Molecular Basis of Type IV...

Google-able (2005)

The following citation is from 2005 but the adjective, this time spelled “Google-able”, was being heard and used in speech a few years earlier

When Scott Painter went looking for funding for a custom-built car company in 2003, he had a relatively easy time raising $25 million. "Everybody knew who I was," he says. "I was Google-able, so it was a very easy thing to put together. That's the benefit of having some success as an entrepreneur."

Inc.com 25 Feb 2005

Can anyone find earlier instances than these? It seems very odd that the expression Goog-able with all its spelling variants, does not appear in print prior to 2005.

Community
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Mari-Lou A
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  • Someone registered "*googleable" in UD in November 2004. It appears the term was already in use at that time. http://it.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=googleable and "ungoogleabl*e" in March 2004: http://it.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ungoogleable –  Dec 28 '15 at 14:38
  • Do you think UD dates are reliable? –  Dec 28 '15 at 17:26
  • @Josh61 It's one of the good things about UD, they record the dates of each entry as they are submitted. – Mari-Lou A Dec 28 '15 at 18:33
  • @Rathony in the sense how come that question got 3 upvotes while this nada? Well, not any longer. What's one man's trash, is another man's treasure, as they say. I'd just like some feedback, that's all. If something needs to be fixed. – Mari-Lou A Dec 28 '15 at 18:55
  • Ok, so if in March 2004 someone took the pain to enter "ungoogleabe" I think it is reasonable to assume the terms in question were already in use probably one or two years before. –  Dec 28 '15 at 18:59
  • @Josh61 it's reasonable your supposition re. dates, but you'd have to see when Google really exploded, I remember there used to be several different search engines when Google was launched. Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, Yahoo! .... Then Google monopolized everything. It's quite frightening to see how much territory they have conquered. – Mari-Lou A Dec 28 '15 at 19:04
  • As I said in response to the other question, "googleable" (or "googlable"/"Google-able", if you wish) was no doubt said within weeks (if not days) of Google going online. I've no doubt that if you could go back and scan techie chat rooms ca 2000 you'd find hundreds of uses. Finding the first case in durable print is a meaningless exercise. – Hot Licks Dec 29 '15 at 14:17
  • @HotLicks easy for you to say but difficult to prove. – Mari-Lou A Jan 09 '16 at 08:18
  • @Mari-LouA - So why don't you disprove it? I've lived in the tech world since 1970 and I know that techies will happily coin new terms at the drop of a hat (aside: would be an interesting idiom to research). I've "coined" a few myself, only to have them pop up later as (briefly) popular terms. – Hot Licks Jan 09 '16 at 13:12
  • @HotLicks I had tried looking via " I've no doubt that if you could go back and scan techie chat rooms ca 2000 you'd find hundreds of uses" with little or no luck. My Google-fu failed me. Sven found a 2004 citation which is a year older than the earliest instance I found. – Mari-Lou A Jan 09 '16 at 13:16
  • @Mari-LouA - The problem is that maybe .001% of the content of techie chat rooms of the era has been preserved somehow. Protocols like IRC were the Wild West with hundreds of servers and thousands of chat groups ("lists", if I recall). There may be substantial amounts of data that is theoretically preserved, but most would be on old hard drives that are sitting in dusty closets. – Hot Licks Jan 09 '16 at 13:25

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The earliest confirmed Google Books match for googlable/googleable that I could find is from Dr. Dobb's Journal, volume 29 (January 2004), which has this numbered entry and associated brief footnote on page 14 [combined snippets]:

  1. But the Users had cause to remember the wisdom of the great prophet M'andee-rice Davies.* And they all trooped home to ponder what had passed, and to be sad.

    * Googlable as "Mandy Rice-Davies"

Another early match—this time for the spelling googleable, though the exact date of publication is unconfirmed—is from Archis, issues 1–4 (2004) [snippet not visible in window]:

To be 'googleable', to be recognized in its intricate database, is an honor. At the end of a lackluster day. Google provides the opportunity for tech-assisted self-adulation: googling one's own name is a portal to 'recognition', seeing your name, underlined in Google's own benign shade of blue is kind of like being a star—even if the connection is ...

Google Books matches for googled in the sense of "used Google to perform Internet searches" go back to at least 2002, although a number of possible matches that are listed as being from 2002 or earlier are of uncertain (and dubious) date. One early match that seems more reliable than many is from Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals, volume 10 (2002) [combined snippets]:

Wait a minute. Did I say "Google it"? "Google"—a verb? "To google"? "I google, you googled, he/she/it has googled"? How exactly would one define this new verb?

Google: (v.) 1. to conduct a search on a Web search engine, in particular a search using Google.com; 2. to phrase a search statement in a manner suiting the software of a typical Web search engine, in particular Google.com.

Once a sizable number of people began using google as a verb, expansion of the family of related words to include googlable/googleable was probably inevitable—so if googled came into recorded use around 2002, use of googlable/googleable from around 2004 seems entirely plausible.

Sven Yargs
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