4 ms·

I love where they said they've "heard feedback". Where? Where can you possibly give feedback to Google about their products? Is this just from their family memb

I love where they said they've "heard feedback". Where? Where can you possibly give feedback to Google about their products? Is this just from their family members at holiday dinners?

scrollaway 4y ago
The PR people writing the article are rephrasing the words of the division lead who has aggregated the feedback from a bunch of project managers who are relaying what the data analysts in each team are interpreting from a host of metrics their engineers implemented. It’s an onion of nonsense. At no point is any user involved. Edit: or as another sibling comment aptly points out, they also might have just heard feedback… from annoyed employees.
- indymike 4y ago
  Translation: The HIPPOs have spoken (Hippo = HIghest Paid Person's Opinion).
- bushbaba 4y ago
  To be fair, many Googlers are on Hackernews. There's been a lot of posts on HN recently complaining about how quotes was broken. Would not surprise me if a few Googler used the chatter to pull reports and quantify the impact leading to this fix.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    I suspect you’re right. But knowing Google I have my doubts most Googlers have any real influence over this, unless they are in VERY specific positions in the company.
  - RulerOf 4y ago
    >To be fair, many Googlers are on Hackernews. ....hmmmmm.... I'd pay money for regex search.
- mcswell 4y ago
  Maybe a decade ago, there were feedback pages. I recall when Google Maps changed its format. (I forget now what the change was, maybe scattering controls all over instead of having a sort of legend where all the controls sat.) There was a place where you could provide feedback, sort of like a Usenet page. Anyway, after the change there were thousands of posts, and after a few days tens of thousands of posts--every last one of them negative. (Well, there were one or two positives, but they were /s.) After a week someone from Google showed up and said they were listening. They eventually changed some very minor part of the format to look sort of more or less a little like it used to, while not budging on most of the changes they had made. At that point, people started posting alternative map sites.
- dannysullivan 4y ago
  I was involved in writing that post and, in particular, that sentence about feedback. I don't work for PR. I work for our search quality team, as a liaison between the team and the public to ... bring feedback we hear in a variety of places to help consider improvements. Hacker News was one of the places earlier this year where there was a lot of feedback about wanting to see how to make quote search work better. In responding to (see my profile) and exploring that feedback, it wasn't that quote searching was broken but that people couldn't readily understand we really did bring back documents with the quoted terms. So that's the feedback that went back to our team, and we looked at how to improve things which lead to the change we announced.
JacobThreeThree 4y ago
Lots of people have been complaining. Some HN examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31421815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31421815 Hopefully for Google's sake they've finally decided reverse the feature removal trend that's been happening for years.
endisneigh 4y ago
You would be surprised how many people who work at Google who hate Google products and say so in the internal groups. People have been complaining about this for years internally.
nextos 4y ago
You can do this in google.com > Settings (bottom right) > Send comments. My translation might not match exactly what you see in Google US. I sent a comment about 3 months ago about a bug in night mode and it got fixed. No idea if my comment was the cause, though.
- a_e_k 4y ago
  I just checked. For Google US the last step is phrased as "Send feedback".
hnburnsy 4y ago
Yeah ironic considering this blog post (or any post at blog.google AFAICT) doesn't allow for comments. It is more like pressrelease.google or marketing.google than blog.google.
ancoron 4y ago
All Google products I have ever used provide the option to give feedback (including screenshots).
- judge2020 4y ago
  To add, I've had Google Docs, YouTube, Store (store.google.com), and Google Search all proactively ask me to rate the experience via a short survey element in the bottom right of the page.
taspeotis 4y ago
At the bottom of the search results: Australia | Brisbane, Queensland - From your IP address - Update location Help Send feedback Privacy Terms If you click "Send feedback" you can ... send feedback.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> they said they've "heard feedback". Where? Where can you possibly give feedback to Google about their products? This exact discussion is pretty common on HN. Some people complain that quoted search no longer works, and generally someone from Google will show up to tell us that it does. It's very interesting to me that this change is specifically targeted at quieting the complaints rather than improving the search functionality. The results are the same as before, but they will now show you the match they found so you can't say "but the string I searched for isn't on the page!". That will certainly address one half of the complaint. But I have also seen it mentioned that quoted search may fail to find pages that do contain the quoted text. The example given was along these lines: Website: "peering through reverent fingers <br> I watch them flourish and fall" Query: "peering through reverent fingers I watch" Result: "no results found for 'peering through reverent fingers I watch'" Unfortunately, highlighting where the quoted string occurs on the result page will do nothing to solve complaints that google fails to find pages that contain the quoted string.

I love where they said they've "heard feedback". Where? Where can you possibly give feedback to Google about their products? Is this just from their family members at holiday dinners?

scrollaway 4y ago

The PR people writing the article are rephrasing the words of the division lead who has aggregated the feedback from a bunch of project managers who are relaying what the data analysts in each team are interpreting from a host of metrics their engineers implemented. It’s an onion of nonsense. At no point is any user involved. Edit: or as another sibling comment aptly points out, they also might have just heard feedback… from annoyed employees.

indymike 4y ago
Translation: The HIPPOs have spoken (Hippo = HIghest Paid Person's Opinion).
bushbaba 4y ago
To be fair, many Googlers are on Hackernews. There's been a lot of posts on HN recently complaining about how quotes was broken. Would not surprise me if a few Googler used the chatter to pull reports and quantify the impact leading to this fix.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  I suspect you’re right. But knowing Google I have my doubts most Googlers have any real influence over this, unless they are in VERY specific positions in the company.
- RulerOf 4y ago
  >To be fair, many Googlers are on Hackernews. ....hmmmmm.... I'd pay money for regex search.
mcswell 4y ago
Maybe a decade ago, there were feedback pages. I recall when Google Maps changed its format. (I forget now what the change was, maybe scattering controls all over instead of having a sort of legend where all the controls sat.) There was a place where you could provide feedback, sort of like a Usenet page. Anyway, after the change there were thousands of posts, and after a few days tens of thousands of posts--every last one of them negative. (Well, there were one or two positives, but they were /s.) After a week someone from Google showed up and said they were listening. They eventually changed some very minor part of the format to look sort of more or less a little like it used to, while not budging on most of the changes they had made. At that point, people started posting alternative map sites.
dannysullivan 4y ago
I was involved in writing that post and, in particular, that sentence about feedback. I don't work for PR. I work for our search quality team, as a liaison between the team and the public to ... bring feedback we hear in a variety of places to help consider improvements. Hacker News was one of the places earlier this year where there was a lot of feedback about wanting to see how to make quote search work better. In responding to (see my profile) and exploring that feedback, it wasn't that quote searching was broken but that people couldn't readily understand we really did bring back documents with the quoted terms. So that's the feedback that went back to our team, and we looked at how to improve things which lead to the change we announced.

JacobThreeThree 4y ago

Lots of people have been complaining. Some HN examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31421815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31421815 Hopefully for Google's sake they've finally decided reverse the feature removal trend that's been happening for years.

endisneigh 4y ago

You would be surprised how many people who work at Google who hate Google products and say so in the internal groups. People have been complaining about this for years internally.

nextos 4y ago

You can do this in google.com > Settings (bottom right) > Send comments. My translation might not match exactly what you see in Google US. I sent a comment about 3 months ago about a bug in night mode and it got fixed. No idea if my comment was the cause, though.

a_e_k 4y ago
I just checked. For Google US the last step is phrased as "Send feedback".

hnburnsy 4y ago

Yeah ironic considering this blog post (or any post at blog.google AFAICT) doesn't allow for comments. It is more like pressrelease.google or marketing.google than blog.google.

ancoron 4y ago

All Google products I have ever used provide the option to give feedback (including screenshots).

judge2020 4y ago
To add, I've had Google Docs, YouTube, Store (store.google.com), and Google Search all proactively ask me to rate the experience via a short survey element in the bottom right of the page.

taspeotis 4y ago

At the bottom of the search results: Australia | Brisbane, Queensland - From your IP address - Update location Help Send feedback Privacy Terms If you click "Send feedback" you can ... send feedback.

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> they said they've "heard feedback". Where? Where can you possibly give feedback to Google about their products? This exact discussion is pretty common on HN. Some people complain that quoted search no longer works, and generally someone from Google will show up to tell us that it does. It's very interesting to me that this change is specifically targeted at quieting the complaints rather than improving the search functionality. The results are the same as before, but they will now show you the match they found so you can't say "but the string I searched for isn't on the page!". That will certainly address one half of the complaint. But I have also seen it mentioned that quoted search may fail to find pages that do contain the quoted text. The example given was along these lines: Website: "peering through reverent fingers <br> I watch them flourish and fall" Query: "peering through reverent fingers I watch" Result: "no results found for 'peering through reverent fingers I watch'" Unfortunately, highlighting where the quoted string occurs on the result page will do nothing to solve complaints that google fails to find pages that contain the quoted string.