Provenance — where it came from
Google reached Japan around 2000. Within a few years, Japanese internet users had done to the brand name what English speakers were doing at the same time — turned it into a verb. But the Japanese version went further: ググる (guguru) is a full native verb, and it conjugates. Past tense ググった, polite ググります, imperative ググれ.
The famous imperative is ググれ (gugure) — “google it yourself,” the standard reply to a lazy question on 2000s message boards, usually sharpened into a five-letter acronym: ggrks (gugure kasu — “google it, you scum”). Rude, efficient, and very much of its decade.
The trick itself is old. Around 1920, Japanese workers took the French word sabotage and made サボる (saboru), “to slack off” — still an everyday verb a century later. Drop a foreign word into Japanese, add る, and it grows conjugations like roots. Guguru did not break any rules. It joined a hundred-year-old family.
Field notes — how it’s used
ググればわかるよ
gugureba wakaru yo
“You’ll find it if you google it.”