Open letter to Google (Larry & Sergey)

Dear Google,

Despite the world wide protests, I am sure mine this letter finds you both in best of spirit and health. Let me start with a story.

Few years ago I was doing my internship. One day I needed some purchase related data. I went to the purchase clerk in the purchase department. He was a nice guy in his late thirties. When I reached his desk, I saw he was doing something on computer. My eyes went to the monitor, he had opened MSN search and had typed ‘Google’ as the query. Before I could blink my eyes, he pressed enter and the search result came on the screen. I was stunned!!! He had just searched ‘Google’ using MSN search engine. I asked him what he was doing. He put a sheepish grin on his face and said, “I have seen you guys do lot of goog-leee (Google), so wanted to do myself, hence was searching for it”. I could not believe it. Please don’t mind the pronunciation. I have been told that ‘goog-lee’ is some kind of cricket bowling and Indians are known to use cricketing terms in real life. Not surprising considering Americans have also been using terms borrowed from baseball such as first base, second base, etc.

I am sure if this news reaches MSN, then the punch line for MSN search engine would be “We have searched ‘Google’ too”

So the upshot is I have seen your rise from that day to present. Now not only you have excellent search engine, but many other innovative products and one of them is blogger. I have been one of the most extensive users of this facility for hosting my blog, reading other’s blog(s) and to interact with them. It is with this interactive or comment facility that I have few issues.

Few months back you introduced the ‘word verification’ scheme to ward off spam comments. I appreciate your concern. But for the past couple of weeks I am smelling rat. I am pretty sure this word verification has driven quite a few bloggers to opticians. Do you get some cut from the opticians, considering you have the capability of identifying the physical location of any blogger? If so then please get in touch with brain surgeons as well. I might not go to optician but I am surely going to have brain hemorrhage while decoding the words.

I am also not sure if the real purpose of word verification is to stop spam comments. Who knows you might be collecting the data on ease of typing of different alphabets individually and in combination. This may be used to design a new kind keyboard in place of conventional ‘QWERTY’ ones. But still if you make me believe the purpose is to stop spam comments, then, I might pass a tip or two on how to make it simpler. Let me know.


I am putting two interesting incidents of using cricket in everyday lives of Indians. This is in comment section to make sure you see the word verification yourself.