No one has ever accused me of being a stickler for proper vocabulary and grammar. Still, I read the news with
interest last year when Webster’s added google to the dictionary because my friends and I use google to settle disputes about spelling by searching for both alternatives and selecting the most popular. Ah, grammar by the crowd. My elementary school teachers would be horrified!

Recently, this trend has moved from the tech geek crowd into the mainstream. My oldest son now uses google as a reference tool as well, as are his friends. So it seems google not only succeeded in making it into the dictionary, it’s now actually replacing it.

What I didn’t understand until I became an advertiser, though, is that Google recognizes this power and is actively using it.
Spelling, punctuation and grammar are all enforced in Google ads. While this seems reasonable, and most of the time we appreciate being spared garish ads, at the same time it results in the Googlecrats creating an enviable position for themselves. The power to restrict the use of new words in our our tech-crazy what’s-new-today world can limit the reach of ideas and products.

A seemingly benign case in point is 3tera’s use of the word “datacenter.” Search and you’ll see that it’s in use by Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Oracle, VMware, and of course 3tera. It’s also commonly used by trade press and analysts. Google, however, doesn’t seem to recognize the word and placed one of our ads on hold with an error message that I haven’t used spaces correctly. Evidently “datacenter” isn’t in the Google dictionary.

The inconsistancy is truly ironic IMHO. Google has become the defacto method for researching anything. Yet, they don’t seem to trust their own results. If they did, the millions of uses of the term datacenter on sites with high page ranks should be sufficient to allow advertisers to use the term in our ads. But, alas, that’s not the case.