When the trademark of a product is no longer recognized as being distinct from the product itself, trademark protection can be lost in a process known as genericizing or trademark erosion. This occurs over time when a brand name is so widely used to describe the underlying product that it comes to describe all such products regardless of the brand. When that becomes the norm, the trademark can be declared as no longer valid and the rights to legally exploit or utilize the trademark are lost. The question is now being asked whether “google” (also googling, googled, etc.) used as a verb to represent the action of conducting a search on the internet has become genericized. The verb obviously arose from the trademarked Google search engine, which over the past decade has become the dominant Internet search engine with 67% to 90% of the search engine market share–depending on which survey your read.