Terminization is the characterization of a term-oriented digital world in which everything seemingly revolves around terms. A good example of terminization is the search engine phenomenon in which Google and others like it act as gateways to the internet and people must enter search terms in order to visit other sites. Even micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Weibo use hashtags or specially formatted terms for everyone to follow everything such as news, events and topics of interest, etc.

Search terms generate billions of dollars of revenue annually for the global economy as evidenced by the tremendous growth of Google, Baidu and others who rely on providing STO (search term optimization) service for finding what terms users search for in order to visit a website.