Nowadays lots of people use the word "google" as a verb, past tense "googled", which generally means to search the web using Google's search engine. When used as a gerund the word is typically "googling". (I'm not sure if these words should be capitalized, but that's not relevant to my question.)
Is there a common word or phrase that can be used in the same way, but that doesn't imply using any particular search engine? I'm curious because not everyone I talk to uses Google.
Example sentence, as a verb:
I _______ for the words "cute kitty" and found lots of results.
Example sentence, as a gerund:
I did some _______ but couldn't find anything relevant.
The best I can think of is "web search" or "web searching" but it strikes me as awkward. I'm hoping there's something a bit better and more natural sounding, especially if it's a single word.
Best Answer
To search [...] online would be my choice. In your example sentence it would read:
...or...
As for your other sentence:
According to Google Ngrams it seems to correlate well with "Google", though I'm quite surprised at those earlier results for the latter! (Perhaps something coming astray during the transcribing...). It also gets a lot more use than "search the net", "search the web" or "search the internet".