Is there a situation where 造語 such as "ググる" could be used with the "ます" ending?

Question

I ask this out of pure curiosity, but would there be any situation where you could reasonably say something along the lines of, "はい、今はそれをググります。"

What I've seen/thought of Katakana+る words has been that they are typically very informal, but I realized that I have not actually seen anyone say it is strictly informal speech. What I would say is probably that "グーグルをします" is what should be said, and "ググります" would be quite strange, but I wanted to ask here and see if anyone else might have a different/more in-depth answer.

Answer 1

Unsurprisingly, this depends on both the word itself and how formal you have to be. You cannot tell the register of a word accurately just by looking at its etymology. In the case of ググる, this verb is not something you would see in traditional newspapers or very formal business letters, but you can hear ググります in everyday business conversations using です/ます. Quite a few verbs derived from loanwords are now common and safe in moderately formal business conversations (メモる, コピる, サボる, ...).

By the way, グーグルをする is incorrect for the same reason why "to do Google" is incorrect. When you want to avoid ググる in very formal speech, you have to say グーグルで検索する or グーグルを使用する.