13 ms·

Once again, HN is the last-resort customer support line for Google. Oh well, upvoted. Embarrassing the company is the only way to get any slightly complex issue

Once again, HN is the last-resort customer support line for Google. Oh well, upvoted. Embarrassing the company is the only way to get any slightly complex issue resolved.

jdm2212 6y ago
I was (briefly) on a Maps-adjacent team at Google circa 2015. From the outside, you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations. One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. They automate the crap out of it and the automation mostly works (scrape structured data off websites, Google My Business, various aggregators, etc.) but it means there's no conceivable way you could provide customer support that will keep up with the volume of support requests because the support requests often ultimately have to get routed to an engineer... and there are only a dozen engineers on the team that owns stuffing all this data into Maps. And those engineers are supposed to be doing mostly feature work. Over time accuracy got better, but 95% accuracy, to say nothing of 99.9% accuracy, is unachievable to the point of being a non-goal. One of this team's bigger time sucks was just other Google engineers complaining about inaccurate data. Someone would go to their favorite restaurant, notice the hours were off, or the business category was wrong, and file a ticket. Then the team would sometimes manually edit the listing to fix it. Sometimes they'd say "no, you have to deal with the same shitty data as all our customers". But that was just the requests coming in from a few thousand users who had access to the internal ticket system and new which component to file stuff under. (Incidentally: this is the origin of the Maps feature where you can now just directly edit a listing and if other users, agree, it gets published.) So, yeah, there isn't really a scalable way to manage support requests. But HN works for some subset of cases, and I too upvote the cases that get complained about here. EDIT: accuracy in the raw data was pretty bad but on a view-weighted basis it was pretty respectable IIRC (>90%). Turns out most people on Maps are looking at the same small subset of establishments, so you have to get those right even if that means making choices that reduce accuracy on other listings.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  > you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations. I mean, I've seen understaffed, shitty-service companies since I was a kid. How is this unique? Fuck them all.
  - snoshy 6y ago
    A lot of times, I would agree with you. In this case though, things might be a bit different. I'm not sure if you agree, but Google Maps has revolutionized physical location for a large portion of people today. Democratizing a thing mainly involves scaling it, and scaling things rapidly is a difficult task. Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me. So what you're saying is, there is this hugely valuable application that has "revolutionized" things for a large fraction of the population, but it's perfectly normal that Google can't be bothered to put more than a piddly number of people on it? If it's really that valuable, Google should not handle it in this half-assed fashion. They should charge money for it, just like any other business that has something it knows is hugely valuable to a large number of people. But instead, they prefer to sell everyone's eyeballs to advertisers. How does this make sense?
      - anchpop 6y ago
        Something I think is underappreciated is that if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money. Google used to run a program called Contributor which let you pay them the minimum amount you'd have to to opt out of ads (you basically just paid them and they used your money to automatically outbid everyone who wanted to advertise to you). I wish they brought this back because I really liked it. They changed it completely so it only worked with "participating sites" [0], which was basically nobody, then killed it altogether (but left the page up). [0]: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
technick 6y ago
Someone ported out my google voice number after getting my business card at DC24. I couldn't get anyone at google to help me out. Finally went thru my contacts on linkedin, found a guy I used to work with who was at google now. He was able to get someone to contact me at google about the issue and I got my number back.
tyoma 6y ago
I am half serious: maybe HN needs a “tech support” feaute, kind of like “show hn” and “ask hn” exist now. If people are going to use HN for last-ditch tech support, there should at least be an official method.
- petargyurov 6y ago
  The only reason it works is _because_ it's unofficial. As soon as it becomes an official offering nobody will go there to upvote things. Besides, this is so far from HN's purpose that nobody should even be considering adding this feature.
diggan 6y ago
Yes, everyone who deals with Google keeps hitting this issue over and over again. It's impossible to get help for certain things. Two cases: I have a bar/restuarant where we been waiting for the verification codes for over two months now. Been trying five times to receive the verification codes for "Google My Business". No one is receiving the codes, there is no other verification codes, emails go unanswered and there is no other way of contacting a human over at Google. Our business still has outdated details and we can get no control over it. Second case is a friend who has a store next to a market. Someone added their phone number to the market, so since about a year ago, people phone her thinking she is the market, asking for information. She receives at least one call a day and have been trying to remove her number from the market since it happened the first time. She also tried everything, but to no avail. It's so frustrating to deal with, but there is really no alternative...
mylons 6y ago
google is a monopoly. they do not have to have customer service. break them up.
- dontblink 6y ago
  Yelp exists? Just because a service is popular does not make it a monopoly. Google should be free to deal with their properties as they see fit. If there is a degradation of quality, that gives others such as Microsoft, Yelp, etc the ability to capitalize.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > Just because a service is popular does not make it a monopoly. True; what makes them a monopoly is that they use their dominance in one market (web search) to make themselves "unfairly" dominant in other areas (maps). > If there is a degradation of quality, that gives others such as Microsoft, Yelp, etc the ability to capitalize. Except that others are handicapped by Google. Example: Average customer wants to look up a business. So, they open their browser (Chrome, 70% of market) and search, which will go to Google because that's the default (ironically, using their dominance of browsers to push their web search), and search for the business, which will then pop up a nice big box at the top showing results from Google Maps. Of course, maybe Google Maps has bad data and Yelp has better data, but since Yelp isn't a Google product it'll be at best somewhere down in the normal web results, not pushed front and center. Monopolies are not about market share; they're about what you do with that market share.

Once again, HN is the last-resort customer support line for Google. Oh well, upvoted. Embarrassing the company is the only way to get any slightly complex issue resolved.

jdm2212 6y ago

I was (briefly) on a Maps-adjacent team at Google circa 2015. From the outside, you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations. One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. They automate the crap out of it and the automation mostly works (scrape structured data off websites, Google My Business, various aggregators, etc.) but it means there's no conceivable way you could provide customer support that will keep up with the volume of support requests because the support requests often ultimately have to get routed to an engineer... and there are only a dozen engineers on the team that owns stuffing all this data into Maps. And those engineers are supposed to be doing mostly feature work. Over time accuracy got better, but 95% accuracy, to say nothing of 99.9% accuracy, is unachievable to the point of being a non-goal. One of this team's bigger time sucks was just other Google engineers complaining about inaccurate data. Someone would go to their favorite restaurant, notice the hours were off, or the business category was wrong, and file a ticket. Then the team would sometimes manually edit the listing to fix it. Sometimes they'd say "no, you have to deal with the same shitty data as all our customers". But that was just the requests coming in from a few thousand users who had access to the internal ticket system and new which component to file stuff under. (Incidentally: this is the origin of the Maps feature where you can now just directly edit a listing and if other users, agree, it gets published.) So, yeah, there isn't really a scalable way to manage support requests. But HN works for some subset of cases, and I too upvote the cases that get complained about here. EDIT: accuracy in the raw data was pretty bad but on a view-weighted basis it was pretty respectable IIRC (>90%). Turns out most people on Maps are looking at the same small subset of establishments, so you have to get those right even if that means making choices that reduce accuracy on other listings.

ta17711771 6y ago
> you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations. I mean, I've seen understaffed, shitty-service companies since I was a kid. How is this unique? Fuck them all.
- snoshy 6y ago
  A lot of times, I would agree with you. In this case though, things might be a bit different. I'm not sure if you agree, but Google Maps has revolutionized physical location for a large portion of people today. Democratizing a thing mainly involves scaling it, and scaling things rapidly is a difficult task. Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me. So what you're saying is, there is this hugely valuable application that has "revolutionized" things for a large fraction of the population, but it's perfectly normal that Google can't be bothered to put more than a piddly number of people on it? If it's really that valuable, Google should not handle it in this half-assed fashion. They should charge money for it, just like any other business that has something it knows is hugely valuable to a large number of people. But instead, they prefer to sell everyone's eyeballs to advertisers. How does this make sense?
    - anchpop 6y ago
      Something I think is underappreciated is that if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money. Google used to run a program called Contributor which let you pay them the minimum amount you'd have to to opt out of ads (you basically just paid them and they used your money to automatically outbid everyone who wanted to advertise to you). I wish they brought this back because I really liked it. They changed it completely so it only worked with "participating sites" [0], which was basically nobody, then killed it altogether (but left the page up). [0]: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

technick 6y ago

Someone ported out my google voice number after getting my business card at DC24. I couldn't get anyone at google to help me out. Finally went thru my contacts on linkedin, found a guy I used to work with who was at google now. He was able to get someone to contact me at google about the issue and I got my number back.

tyoma 6y ago

I am half serious: maybe HN needs a “tech support” feaute, kind of like “show hn” and “ask hn” exist now. If people are going to use HN for last-ditch tech support, there should at least be an official method.

petargyurov 6y ago
The only reason it works is _because_ it's unofficial. As soon as it becomes an official offering nobody will go there to upvote things. Besides, this is so far from HN's purpose that nobody should even be considering adding this feature.

diggan 6y ago

Yes, everyone who deals with Google keeps hitting this issue over and over again. It's impossible to get help for certain things. Two cases: I have a bar/restuarant where we been waiting for the verification codes for over two months now. Been trying five times to receive the verification codes for "Google My Business". No one is receiving the codes, there is no other verification codes, emails go unanswered and there is no other way of contacting a human over at Google. Our business still has outdated details and we can get no control over it. Second case is a friend who has a store next to a market. Someone added their phone number to the market, so since about a year ago, people phone her thinking she is the market, asking for information. She receives at least one call a day and have been trying to remove her number from the market since it happened the first time. She also tried everything, but to no avail. It's so frustrating to deal with, but there is really no alternative...

mylons 6y ago

google is a monopoly. they do not have to have customer service. break them up.

dontblink 6y ago
Yelp exists? Just because a service is popular does not make it a monopoly. Google should be free to deal with their properties as they see fit. If there is a degradation of quality, that gives others such as Microsoft, Yelp, etc the ability to capitalize.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > Just because a service is popular does not make it a monopoly. True; what makes them a monopoly is that they use their dominance in one market (web search) to make themselves "unfairly" dominant in other areas (maps). > If there is a degradation of quality, that gives others such as Microsoft, Yelp, etc the ability to capitalize. Except that others are handicapped by Google. Example: Average customer wants to look up a business. So, they open their browser (Chrome, 70% of market) and search, which will go to Google because that's the default (ironically, using their dominance of browsers to push their web search), and search for the business, which will then pop up a nice big box at the top showing results from Google Maps. Of course, maybe Google Maps has bad data and Yelp has better data, but since Yelp isn't a Google product it'll be at best somewhere down in the normal web results, not pushed front and center. Monopolies are not about market share; they're about what you do with that market share.