About

Marathi Name of Tuna Fish, also known as Paani Main Utarke Machi Ko Puch Lavde, is a Don't Google prank involving the top Google search result preview text for the prompt "Marathi name of tuna fish." The top result delivered an incorrect and expletive-laden answer that read, "paani main utarke machi ko puch lavde," which translates to "get in the water and ask the fish yourself d--khead." The incorrect translation came from a parody comment left on a language translation website. Screenshots of the search results, as well as posts asking other people to Google the phrase, began going viral in January 2022.

Origin

On January 21st, 2022, Instagram^[1] page @school.days__ posted a screenshot of a Google search result that showed an incorrect result for the query "marathi name of tuna fish." Marathi is the local language spoken in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The top result was sourced from a language translation website called WhatIsCalled.com^[2] where users provide translations for various words and vote on each other's responses to boost them to the top of the suggested meanings list.

The top result at the time was from a guest user who responded by saying "paani main utarke machi ko puch lavde," which means "get in the water and ask the fish yourself d--khead." The Instagram post by @school.days__ received over 65,000 likes in the eight months since its upload (seen below).

Spread

The hoax immediately went viral, with the phrase "marathi name for tuna fish" trending on Google nearing the end of January 2022. Moreover, the competition for the top suggested response on WhatIsCalled.com began to get tougher, with some users downvoting the offensive top result and others adding their own to the mix. An example of the results for "Marathi name of tuna fish" can be seen below, with four results containing variations on the word "lavda," or "d--khead." The last sentence on the image below is an emphatic request by a seemingly mortified user begging everyone to stop desecrating their native language on a national stage.

The joke became popularized on WhatsApp and Facebook in the following days, with various Facebook pages urging people to Google the Marathi translation of Tuna Fish. On January 22nd, 2022, the Facebook^[3] page "The Engineer Bro" posted about the prank, gathering over 4,000 reactions in eight months (seen below, left). That same day, the Instagram^[4] page @trolls_official posted about the prank as well, gathering over 1 million likes in eight months (seen below, right).

Search Interest

External References