Re:good for google (Score 1)

"I may just be missing something but what is word verification about then if not to stop spammer (bots) from leaving unwanted comments?" You're right. The ability to turn on captchas in Blogger comments is to fight the spammers/spam bots leaving comments. The "flag?" feature is to flag (among other things) splogs. Two different tools, but with the same goal of reducing spammers of some sort.