Rachel was wearing this shirt Friday. It got me thinking about Google in a couple different ways.

First: Is anyone—outside of Microsoft employees who got it for free—going to wear Bing shirts? And what would the back say, anyway?

Second: Microsoft has chosen a ridiculously tight knot to try to untie—or even slightly loosen—in relation to Google’s ownership of search.

Google has reached ubiquity in the way Kleenex, Band-Aid and Xerox did. People don’t search for things, they Google it. Some so-called “social media gurus” have started saying “Google me” instead of handing out business cards as a sign of the internet abilities. Google is synonymous with online search.

But Google has it even better than Kleenex and Band-Aid. The latter are brand names for a product that can be mimicked, marketed and merchandised as the low-cost, the softer, or the designer alternative in the same space. People can compare product options side-by-side and decide which brand of “Kleenex” they want to buy. But there’s no way to put a low-priced, generic brand along side Google on a shelf. Google is a destination, and therefore owns the marketplace, too.

So Microsoft has to create a technically acceptable, distinct option for search… which they may have done. But they currently have that option sitting on a shelf in some small, out-of-the-way store across town. To get it in the same marketplace, they have to make themselves part of the cultural lexicon. That’s a difficult marketing challenge to say the least. “The world’s first decision engine” just doesn’t have the same entertaining double entendres as Google’s tagline. That makes the T Shirts less popular. And, in this case, it might be the perfect indicator of marketplace health.