You know, sometimes it really makes me mad that it's difficult to get into contact with a person at Google for support of their products. But, I've got to hand it to them. They could have issued a non-personal public statement like most companies and signed it with "Google Search Team" But instead there is a personal touch. It's public statements like these that add just a bit of personal touch that makes people love them. My 2 cents. Entrepreneurs take note.
It's safe to say that many Googlers read what people write on the web and talk about it internally, even if we don't always respond. We're power users too, so if a search result bothers you, it almost certainly bothers us too. :)
Can you speak about the possibility for personal domain blacklists for Google accounts? I know giving users the option to remove sites from their own search results is talked about a lot in these HN threads. Is there any talk internally about implementing something like this?
We've definitely discussed this. Our policy in search quality is not to pre-announce things before they launch. If we offer an experiment along those lines, I'll be among the first to show up here and let people know about it. :)
The reason you can't in contact with people at Google is because you're not the customer. Paying businesses are the customers. Not just trying to sound snarky - it's true.
No, the reason why it's difficult to contact people at Google is that 1 billion+ users visit us each week, and we only have ~20,000 Google employees. Even if every single employee did nothing but user support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 50,000 users apiece.
Likewise, there are 200,000,000+ domain names. Even if every single employee did nothing but webmaster support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 10,000 domains apiece. The same argument goes for supporting hundreds of thousands of advertisers.
The problem of user, customer, and advertiser support at web-wide levels is very hard. That's why we've looked for scalable solutions like blogging and videos. I've made 300+ videos that have gotten 3.5M views: http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp for example. There's no way I could talk to that many webmasters personally.
Of course not everybody should be able to contact Google 1:1, but at least all the people that were subject to an action that required human intervention from Google.
Example: I get my adsense account or site banner in a non automatic way since there is some problem with the content: so not into an automated way, but because somebody looked at my site.
I should, in that case, have a chance to communicate with Google. This is inherently scalable as everything started with a 1:1 action.
You do, though. I recently had my AdWords account suspended and got to talk to a human at Google to handle the issue (through normal channels). For Chrome OS, we have an actual call center with real people sitting in it.
That's very good, this way it is balanced as actually nobody with a minimal business idea can expect google to reply 1:1 to normal users that happen to don't find what they want in the search engine or like.
It is, however, completely wrong to assume that this means that Google has no incentive to treat you well. It is not altruism that compels them to remove spam from search results.
Google needs many happy users to be able to offer an attractive product to its customers. They depend on people using them just as much as they depend on advertisers paying them money. Both sides of the market are important, advertisers and users. Google cannot just ignore one side.
Those who use Google to search don’t pay Google any money and they are, in that sense, no customers. You shouldn’t read much more into that word, though.
(Two sided markets and network effects are fascinating and relevant to so many discussions on HN. Wikipedia has a pretty good primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market)
