Indian denied credit for increasing Yahoo traffic
By Shalini Singh

On June 18, a bright Indian techie spots a bug in the way a well-known American company calculates and posts statistics for web searches on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other search engines.  As a result of his investigations, Yahoo Search market share jumps from an incorrect 13.3 percent to 19 percent.  The Indian techie BalaSundaraRaman (Sundar) used to work as a Research Engineer at Yahoo before his current role as Technical Expert at Ziva Software.

BalaSundaraRaman, who studied at Madurai Kamraj University and International Institute of Information Technology, was quietly pleased at how he had identified and offered a solution for the bug.

Compete.com, the Web Analytics Company, with the bug in its software is one of the most quoted companies in USA. Compete gets more than one million unique visitors a month and is among the top 1700 most visited websites in USA.  Every month it releases it facts about Web Search Market Share which is quoted extensively and affects marketing strategies and dollars.

What did Compete.com com do when Bangalore-based Indian techie BalaSundaraRaman helped correct its statistics?  It fixed the problem on June 19, but for a few days refused to credit the Indian techie.  BalaSundaraRaman was stoic but a bit hurt.  He wrote in his blog:  “I’m mildly disappointed that neither Danny (SearchEngineLand) nor Jeremy (Compete) chose to acknowledge me by name or link to my post. Other commentators have done so”.

By now other technical experts had started crediting Sundar.  Finally, on June 23,  Compete.com did the same and publicly thanked  Sundar.

Why did it take Compete so long to acknowledge an Indian techie?  Sloth,  ego, bureaucracy or plain bloody mindedness?  Take your pick.

By the way Compete advertises their motto as “Track your rivals.  And eat their lunch”.  Quite apt is it not?

Techgoss note:  Sundar’s blog can be read at
http://enkirukkal.blogspot.com/