Today CNN wrote a piece about the “‘Most dangerous’ celebs to search for online”. The article discussed which celebrity searches that were most likely to lead to sites infected with spyware. It was an interesting enough story, but what caught my eye were the two opening sentences:
Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.
Now, while Microsoft may be hoping that people will associate the name of their revamped search engine, Bing, with “the ringing of a bell that signals the ‘aha’ moment when a search leads to an answer”, I would venture to guess that CNN chose to use Bing as the search-engine-as-a-verb, instead of one of the other two major search engines, for entirely different reasons.
Let’s face it, Googling or Yahooing Miss Biel doesn’t exactly inspire any sexual connotations whatsoever, whereas I know there are plenty of people who wanted to “Bing Jessica Biel” long before Microsoft grabbed the name.
Subtle, CNN. Very subtle. 😀
