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You are actually pointing out a tremendous opportunity that Google has internally and externally. I work at Google and recently tried to file a bug about the ca

by leoh 5y ago

You are actually pointing out a tremendous opportunity that Google has internally and externally. I work at Google and recently tried to file a bug about the calculator embedded in search. It was dastardly difficult to find how to file the ticket. It took me maybe an hour. A better system for filing tickets internally and for filing and triaging tickets from external users would be a tremendous asset for Google.

mattnewton 5y ago
If it's about search, you could always use go/bad I think?
judge2020 5y ago
https://issuetracker.google.com/ https://issuetracker.google.com/ is supposed to be it, but if it were completely open and easy to use i'm sure they'd need a dedicated moderation team just for filtering the issues. The knowledge and dedication barrier is a frustrating but mostly effective way to weed out those with non-issues or issues that really don't affect them much (however humane you believe that is).
- xg15 5y ago
  I mean yeah, then they should put up a dedicated moderation team to do so. It's not like they have not enough money to do so.
igetspam 5y ago
Did GUTS not survive? When I left, it was pretty solid. Some very close friends of mine spent years on that system. Haven't thought about it in a while but it was so simple and easy. Then again, that was a decade ago.
- mike_d 5y ago
  GUTS is still used for things like desk moves, but buganizer is where eng tickets live. (at least when I left a few years ago)
graderjs 5y ago
I guess this is why Amazon is playing the long game with their obsessive focus on customers. I don't know how that really plays out where the rubber meets the road but that's what Jeff bezos always keeps talking about.
- dleslie 5y ago
  It plays out with Amazon absolutely crushing Google when it tried to be a consumer marketplace, and even trouncing Google at providing web infrastructure services. If, somehow, an antitrust ruling split ads from the rest of Google the non-ads remainder wouldn't last more than a few years.
  - darig 5y ago
  - alexb_ 5y ago
    Alphabet as a whole is an organization built by the immense money that comes from monopolizing digital advertising (through some very... unscrupulous means) and then run by people deluding themselves into thinking they can do anything else. There's a reason everything is "killed by google" - I'm not exactly sure anyone there knows how to do damn near anything that isn't propped up by investor hype and the money they make from ads and other strictly profitable ventures such as GCP. Alphabet only has the ability to do immensely stupid things because their core business gives them damn near infinite money to play with. You are 100% correct in that ads are the ONLY thing propping up google as a business. This is probably a very bold prediction, but I think that when money starts getting more expensive, when rich billionaires are more reluctant to just throw money at inane, borderline speculative bullshit, there will be a massive hemorrhaging of unnecessary business. And maybe this is a little out there but... you know how YouTube doesn't actually make any fucking money? Interesting things to think about for sure.
    - GFischer 5y ago
      The YouTube thing is false as of a few years ago. If you have noticed, they've crammed it full of ads. https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22596592/google-q2-2021-record-revenue-profit-youtube-ad-cloud-search https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22596592/google-q2-2021-r... I think it's projected to earn 20 billion this year.
footlose_3815 5y ago
[dead]
logicallee 5y ago
(edited) If you don't mind sharing, what is the bug? - My comment originally read as follows, 2 people downvoted it. >I work at Google and recently tried to file a bug about the calculator embedded in search. It was dastardly difficult to find how to file the ticket. It took me maybe an hour. A better system for filing tickets internally and for filing and triaging tickets from external users would be a tremendous asset for Google. I didn't work for Google directly but I did work via another company (Tech Mahindra) so I am saying this as somewhat of an outsider compared with you. You mention a bug about the calculator embedded in search: could you give me the details, and I can try to get it solved via my Google contacts. For context, in my personal experience as a user and engineer, the Google embedded calculator is the best product among all of Google's many offerings and works flawlessly for all inputs. I find it breathtaking. For example, here is how many feet times pounds you can turn 3000 Calories into: https://ibb.co/qJ0Qz0L https://ibb.co/qJ0Qz0L it worked on my first attempt. What does this mean? Well here's a foot-pound: https://ibb.co/N3WCxYV https://ibb.co/N3WCxYV If you weigh 180 pounds you're not climbing Mt. Everest twice (29,032′) without burning 3000 Calories. (Even at 100% efficiency). Try getting a result like that from any other calculator (though Wolfram Alpha gets close). What's the bug you tried to report? (What did you enter, what is the correct output and why is it correct, and what is the returned output and why is it incorrect?) I've never seen it make a mistake so far, and I use it heavily for all sorts of things. (Sometimes I force Google to show me the calculator by typing = at the end of my Google query.) Since the product works so well for me personally, I'd love to understand what problem you have with it.
- WithinReason 5y ago
  You just found a bug in Google Calculator. You wrote "calories" but Google is giving you the answer in "kilocalories". If you change "calories" to "kilocalories" the answer doesn't change. I wonder how many times in the past has it given you the wrong answer without you noticing?
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    That's what people mean by calories, it's not a bug. It even labels it precisely!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
joshuamorton 5y ago
The discoverability may not be the best, but its not terrible. There's a "Send Feedback" button on most search result pages (and specific ones per-result if you click the 3-dot menus). The same "Send Feedback" thing is available in Gmail (though its hidden in a (?) menu), Youtube etc. IME that feedback is generally taken seriously.
onion2k 5y ago
You are actually pointing out a tremendous opportunity that Google has internally and externally. While there isn't a way to report problems, or get help with problems, and problems aren't tracked or measured, every problem is a singular example that can be hand-waved away with an "it's just that particular user being dumb". Refusing to support customers is a choice Google has made in order to be able to ignore problems the engineers won't (or can't) solve.
jakub_g 5y ago
Maybe they don't want you to file the bug too easily? I imagine Google would getting 10,000s bugs per day if it was too easy.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  I'd rather know where my ship is burning instead of closing my eyes and just having happy thoughts. But then, I am an engineer, not some marketing drone...
  - llampx 5y ago
    Rest assured that they fix their AdSense and AdWords bugs very very fast.
  - bosie 5y ago
    Curious but how would you figure out where the ship is burning if you are receiving a larger number of bug reports, e.g. 1 million bug reports per month? Loads of duplication will also follow etc. Sounds like you need entire teams to figure out what the real bugs are at that point and maintain the bug list? Though I can't think of a workflow from the top of my head.
    - DocTomoe 5y ago
      This very much is a solved problem - it comes down to standardization in tools, categorization of incidents, keyword analysis of incident description, and (probably automatable) correlation with logfiles and identifiers. Preventive maintenance is not a concept that has been around only recently, and a good QA team has a whole toolkit of things to throw at code before it hits the customer. And yes, ultimately, it is a question on whether you invest the resources to deal with the dumpster fire, or just let it burn to ashes. I am also a big believer in "You build it, you run it", and a "no new features as long as there are open bug tickets" approaches, making teams responsible for their own technical debt. Google with it's "Let's never maintain our products, let the bitrot make them gradually worse and eventually EOL them" approach seems to prefer to avoid that kind of cost. I used to be a Google fanboy in the early 2000s. Maybe it's coming with age, but these days I prefer boring tech that works well as compared than half-baked moonshots, and Google may have burned me once too many. Other software megacorps (and even some NGOs) do this better than the big G.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
> A better system for filing tickets internally and for filing and triaging tickets from external users would be a tremendous asset for Google. The problem is not that they don't have a tool; they could easily build one almost overnight. They have a glut of very competent technical labor, lots of capital, infrastructure up the ass. They don't care. The tech people are convinced they're geniuses who build stuff that never breaks. The business people think they've figured out every problem a user could have and are satisfied that the documentation and snippets of help text are sufficient. The accountants say "it would cost us more to create such a system and staff it than we would lose in business from not addressing it."

by leoh 5y ago

mattnewton 5y ago

If it's about search, you could always use go/bad I think?

judge2020 5y ago

https://issuetracker.google.com/ https://issuetracker.google.com/ is supposed to be it, but if it were completely open and easy to use i'm sure they'd need a dedicated moderation team just for filtering the issues. The knowledge and dedication barrier is a frustrating but mostly effective way to weed out those with non-issues or issues that really don't affect them much (however humane you believe that is).

xg15 5y ago
I mean yeah, then they should put up a dedicated moderation team to do so. It's not like they have not enough money to do so.

igetspam 5y ago

Did GUTS not survive? When I left, it was pretty solid. Some very close friends of mine spent years on that system. Haven't thought about it in a while but it was so simple and easy. Then again, that was a decade ago.

mike_d 5y ago
GUTS is still used for things like desk moves, but buganizer is where eng tickets live. (at least when I left a few years ago)

graderjs 5y ago

I guess this is why Amazon is playing the long game with their obsessive focus on customers. I don't know how that really plays out where the rubber meets the road but that's what Jeff bezos always keeps talking about.

dleslie 5y ago
It plays out with Amazon absolutely crushing Google when it tried to be a consumer marketplace, and even trouncing Google at providing web infrastructure services. If, somehow, an antitrust ruling split ads from the rest of Google the non-ads remainder wouldn't last more than a few years.
- darig 5y ago
- alexb_ 5y ago
  Alphabet as a whole is an organization built by the immense money that comes from monopolizing digital advertising (through some very... unscrupulous means) and then run by people deluding themselves into thinking they can do anything else. There's a reason everything is "killed by google" - I'm not exactly sure anyone there knows how to do damn near anything that isn't propped up by investor hype and the money they make from ads and other strictly profitable ventures such as GCP. Alphabet only has the ability to do immensely stupid things because their core business gives them damn near infinite money to play with. You are 100% correct in that ads are the ONLY thing propping up google as a business. This is probably a very bold prediction, but I think that when money starts getting more expensive, when rich billionaires are more reluctant to just throw money at inane, borderline speculative bullshit, there will be a massive hemorrhaging of unnecessary business. And maybe this is a little out there but... you know how YouTube doesn't actually make any fucking money? Interesting things to think about for sure.
  - GFischer 5y ago
    The YouTube thing is false as of a few years ago. If you have noticed, they've crammed it full of ads. https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22596592/google-q2-2021-record-revenue-profit-youtube-ad-cloud-search https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22596592/google-q2-2021-r... I think it's projected to earn 20 billion this year.

footlose_3815 5y ago

[dead]

logicallee 5y ago

(edited) If you don't mind sharing, what is the bug? - My comment originally read as follows, 2 people downvoted it. >I work at Google and recently tried to file a bug about the calculator embedded in search. It was dastardly difficult to find how to file the ticket. It took me maybe an hour. A better system for filing tickets internally and for filing and triaging tickets from external users would be a tremendous asset for Google. I didn't work for Google directly but I did work via another company (Tech Mahindra) so I am saying this as somewhat of an outsider compared with you. You mention a bug about the calculator embedded in search: could you give me the details, and I can try to get it solved via my Google contacts. For context, in my personal experience as a user and engineer, the Google embedded calculator is the best product among all of Google's many offerings and works flawlessly for all inputs. I find it breathtaking. For example, here is how many feet times pounds you can turn 3000 Calories into: https://ibb.co/qJ0Qz0L https://ibb.co/qJ0Qz0L it worked on my first attempt. What does this mean? Well here's a foot-pound: https://ibb.co/N3WCxYV https://ibb.co/N3WCxYV If you weigh 180 pounds you're not climbing Mt. Everest twice (29,032′) without burning 3000 Calories. (Even at 100% efficiency). Try getting a result like that from any other calculator (though Wolfram Alpha gets close). What's the bug you tried to report? (What did you enter, what is the correct output and why is it correct, and what is the returned output and why is it incorrect?) I've never seen it make a mistake so far, and I use it heavily for all sorts of things. (Sometimes I force Google to show me the calculator by typing = at the end of my Google query.) Since the product works so well for me personally, I'd love to understand what problem you have with it.

WithinReason 5y ago
You just found a bug in Google Calculator. You wrote "calories" but Google is giving you the answer in "kilocalories". If you change "calories" to "kilocalories" the answer doesn't change. I wonder how many times in the past has it given you the wrong answer without you noticing?
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  That's what people mean by calories, it's not a bug. It even labels it precisely!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

joshuamorton 5y ago

The discoverability may not be the best, but its not terrible. There's a "Send Feedback" button on most search result pages (and specific ones per-result if you click the 3-dot menus). The same "Send Feedback" thing is available in Gmail (though its hidden in a (?) menu), Youtube etc. IME that feedback is generally taken seriously.

onion2k 5y ago

You are actually pointing out a tremendous opportunity that Google has internally and externally. While there isn't a way to report problems, or get help with problems, and problems aren't tracked or measured, every problem is a singular example that can be hand-waved away with an "it's just that particular user being dumb". Refusing to support customers is a choice Google has made in order to be able to ignore problems the engineers won't (or can't) solve.

jakub_g 5y ago

Maybe they don't want you to file the bug too easily? I imagine Google would getting 10,000s bugs per day if it was too easy.

DocTomoe 5y ago
I'd rather know where my ship is burning instead of closing my eyes and just having happy thoughts. But then, I am an engineer, not some marketing drone...
- llampx 5y ago
  Rest assured that they fix their AdSense and AdWords bugs very very fast.
- bosie 5y ago
  Curious but how would you figure out where the ship is burning if you are receiving a larger number of bug reports, e.g. 1 million bug reports per month? Loads of duplication will also follow etc. Sounds like you need entire teams to figure out what the real bugs are at that point and maintain the bug list? Though I can't think of a workflow from the top of my head.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    This very much is a solved problem - it comes down to standardization in tools, categorization of incidents, keyword analysis of incident description, and (probably automatable) correlation with logfiles and identifiers. Preventive maintenance is not a concept that has been around only recently, and a good QA team has a whole toolkit of things to throw at code before it hits the customer. And yes, ultimately, it is a question on whether you invest the resources to deal with the dumpster fire, or just let it burn to ashes. I am also a big believer in "You build it, you run it", and a "no new features as long as there are open bug tickets" approaches, making teams responsible for their own technical debt. Google with it's "Let's never maintain our products, let the bitrot make them gradually worse and eventually EOL them" approach seems to prefer to avoid that kind of cost. I used to be a Google fanboy in the early 2000s. Maybe it's coming with age, but these days I prefer boring tech that works well as compared than half-baked moonshots, and Google may have burned me once too many. Other software megacorps (and even some NGOs) do this better than the big G.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

> A better system for filing tickets internally and for filing and triaging tickets from external users would be a tremendous asset for Google. The problem is not that they don't have a tool; they could easily build one almost overnight. They have a glut of very competent technical labor, lots of capital, infrastructure up the ass. They don't care. The tech people are convinced they're geniuses who build stuff that never breaks. The business people think they've figured out every problem a user could have and are satisfied that the documentation and snippets of help text are sufficient. The accountants say "it would cost us more to create such a system and staff it than we would lose in business from not addressing it."