Do you Google?

Last week, Google posted on their blog about their brand, and, as they saw it, the bastardisation of their years of hard work. They are, apparently, sick to the back teeth of people saying ‘I Googled X’ when in actual fact they used a competitive search engine.

To turn what could be perceived as a slightly irritating post on their part, they added some ‘helpful examples’ of where they would allow us to use their name, and where it would be entirely inappropriate. For example, the following:

"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."

Interestingly, Google don’t allow for comments on their blogs. Perhaps because they could predict the backlash they might provoke? But it does present a conundrum - is it a good or a bad thing when your brand becomes synonymous with the action they promote?  It seems the general answer from the blogosphere is that this is no more a sign than Google getting too big for its boots - such as the post here.