Can Search Engines Read Sanskrit Fonts?

suchandra · December 3, 2008

No, they can't. For search engines Sanskrit fonts are encrypted signs they cant process. A soon you enter into google a sanskrit font it immediately turns it into a normal font. However, when you try to find something what contains sanskrit fonts, the search engines won't show you any result.

In other words, all those huge Prabhupada encyclopedias are cut off, are not processed by any search engine.

There're lately huge efforts being made by putting Prabhupada's books, lectures, letters and conversations online. Indeed this must have taken years to type all those thousands of lectures and letters and make them readable hopefully for millions of people with internet access.

Now, meanwhile every child has understood that without search engines like Google, , Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Live Search, Guruji, AltaVista, etc. the internet is dead and you can't find anything. The question that arises with all this present knowledge how search engines actually work and that they have no Sanskrit fonts installed, one might ask this question, why people are so preoccupied to introduce Sanskrit fonts on the internet?

Try enter any Sanskrit font at google - it immediatedly changes it into a non-Sanskrit letter and shows the result as having entered a word without Sanskrit fonts. Seems like at Prabhupada's letter encyclopedia they didn't use Sanskrit because the server configuration doesn't allow Sanskrit fonts to be installed, but everywhere else you only find Sanskrit fonts, even at dandavats.com.

Ok, let's get precise, vedabase.net, http://vanisource.org/wiki/SB_<wbr>6.7, causelessmery.com, prabhupadabooks.com - they all are de facto encrypted webpages, no search engine can read. In other words, whenever you enter a term like jnana or siksa, be sure, no search engine will direct you to Prabhupada's online encyclopedia but only to people who use those terms in their own writings.

Additionally, people have to install Sanskrit fonts on their pc machines, but even this doesn't work for example in case of GBC papers written in PDF. As soon you copy let's say "Srila Prabhupada" and paste it into wordpad it reads like "Crela Prabhup_da" although you have all Sanskrit fonts installed. In other words - chosing the approach of presumption of innocence - without knowing, accidently, by chance - they encrypted the complete teachings of Srila Prabhupada in the world wide internet.

Making it unreadable for billions of people and any search engine and people who might enter "Krsna" with even three dots below r,s and n - they will surely never surf to an original text of Prabhupada or Sastra, because search engines immediately change it into non Sanskrit fonts as having entered a non-Sanskrit term.

When trying to copy and paste let's say a Srimad-Bhagavatam purport and use it in a letter to back up a point you have to change all these Sanskrit fonts and replace them with normal fonts so that you are sure that the receiver is able to see text and not just boxes.

Somehow it seems that a few people considered at one point to make this decision, should we introduce Sanskrit fonts in the internet and they all came to this conclusion, yes, it is important to have it all in Sanskrit. Wise decision.

Lotusflower · December 3, 2008

Well you could have a Sanskrit Font based website and sister site with no sanskrit like vedabase.net. Though if I put vedabase into Google in show Sanskrit diacritic marks, I have Balarama Fonts installed on my Laptop.

I think some sites need to put them robots in pages some google can't see them, just the pages with sanskrit. I think I noticed this long time ago, you'd think Sanskirt fonts would be supported somehow in Google. Maybe somebody should email Google (if you can find their email address, try googling it) :smash:

suchandra · December 3, 2008

Well you could have a Sanskrit Font based website and sister site with no sanskrit like vedabase.net. Though if I put vedabase into Google in show Sanskrit diacritic marks, I have Balarama Fonts installed on my Laptop.

I think some sites need to put them robots in pages some google can't see them, just the pages with sanskrit. I think I noticed this long time ago, you'd think Sanskirt fonts would be supported somehow in Google. Maybe somebody should email Google (if you can find their email address, try googling it)

Seems like when there is for example Sanskrit/text/Sanskrit, the text in between the Sanskrit words is not read by search engines, they just skip it.

When entering for example "Caitanya" you only get to the headlines of CC at vedabase.net, never to the inside. Or take, Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, google only goes to the main page but never displays a result within the book. Lets say someone enters reincarnation. Normaly search engines would show all the results of so many Bhagavatam verses which contain "reincarnation".

This doesn't happen, google only goes so far, http://www.vedabase.com/index.php?main=contact&content=links where there're no Sanskrit fonts.