Name game update

Last month, I payed out a couple of scientific databases over their inability to deal with authors who change their names. After a reader suggested that I was unfairly picking on huge corporations by insulting them in a blog without giving right of reply, I emailed both Google scholar and Thompson scientific to see why their databases weren’t able to determine that an author who changes her surname is still the same person. I still haven’t heard anything from Thomson, but Google sent me this reply:

“Hello Chuck,

Thank you for your note. As you may have noticed, Google Scholar is in
beta, and we're currently working out some of the kinks. We appreciate
your bringing this to our attention, and we'll pass it on to our
engineering team. Thank you for your assistance in improving Google
Scholar.

Sincerely,

The Google Scholar Team”