6 ms·

I'm happy to ask the right team at Google about this and point them to the post on hizook.com.

patio11 17y ago
As happy as I am that you're Google's unofficial ombudsman, Matt, you're a big billion dollar company who many of us are intensely reliant on for our businesses. There needs to be a support channel other than "make a PR issue for Google and Matt Cutts will swoop by to save the day". I had a big issue with AdWords earlier this month. Google made it all but impossible for me to reach anyone about it. Earlier this year, I had an issue with my bank denying an AdWords bill (to protect me against possible fraud). It took one minute on the phone to resolve. You make a hundred times what my bank does off me. Why is human contact only possible if we speak the secret password into the telephone disguised as a shoe which is stored in the unused broom closet marked Beware of Leopard.
- pavs 17y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Much smaller companies with much smaller capital have options to contact for support issues in a person to person basis. With Google Adwords, it is virtually non-existant. Considering the fact that you have to either really screw up or get a lot of attention to yourself for Google to get to you, without that you are out of luck. Automated response is not a solution to all problems.
- bk 17y ago
  Here's my thinking: 1. Google knows how to scale computers, and perhaps engineering teams, but not people in general. 2. "You make a hundred times what my bank does off me" - Exactly, and hiring pesky call center employees, who would have to be good on top of it, would ruin Google's profit/stock price. We're all desperate, depending on practically the only ad game in town, so we bark but have no bite. A higher-end (aka non-cpc|cpm) revenue model is the only way out, I'm afraid.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    I don't agree that costs throughout the system need to rise. If people want (or need) a higher level of support, they should be able to pay for it, preferably on a pay as you go model with refunds for genuine grievances.
  - lsc 17y ago
    there are other ad networks. uh, look at my other comments. Personally, I think you are right that 'cost per click' and 'cost per impression' are both easy to game. The auction model, I think, might mean the beginning of a better way. Essentially, advertisers bid on what they are willing to pay per day. (now, personally, I think project wonderful's implementation is slightly flawed, but it is moving in the correct direction.)
- pg 17y ago
  Though it may not be a complete answer, it is encouraging that people from Google will reply on public forums. You'd never see an Apple employee posting on a thread about someone whose iPhone app had been sitting in the pipeline for months, or a Paypal employee posting on a thread about someone whose account had been summarily frozen.
  - silencio 17y ago
    On the other hand, the Google employee who has answered here is Matt Cutts. I doubt many lesser-known employees at Google have the luxury of replying outside of official company forums and sites in such a manner. From personal experience, finding an Apple employee who can even find out what is going on with an iPhone app waiting for review for months can be difficult if not impossible without connections inside the company. However, if you have a development-related question or a bug report you want looked at, there's plenty of Apple employees on Twitter that would be happy to answer such as Chris Espinosa (a manager on the Xcode team and Apple employee #8, @cdespinosa) and Michael Jurewitz (developer tools evangelist, @jurewitz).
    - andreyf 17y ago
      FWIW, I've seen "lesser-known" Google employees get people in touch with the right teams.
  - shiranaihito 17y ago
    I'd wager that he's offering to help not because Google is such a friendly and benevolent business entity, but because it's in the spirit of Hacker News (and ultimately, in Google's best interest to do so). The credibility of Don't Be Evil is taking a lot of hits these days. Some of us were never really convinced.
    - lucifer 17y ago
      I fail to see how this is "evil". The evil one worries about in context of a company like Google is information privacy.
- MattCutts 17y ago
  There is a support channel for appeals, and it sounds like hizook.com submitted an appeal via that channel earlier this week. My guess is that the Google team is already looking into it; I just wanted to let people know that I'd ask the relevant team from my side as well. Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would be difficult to have one-on-one conversations with all of them even if everyone at Google did nothing but try to provide that support. Historically, we try to tackle that challenge by reducing the need to talk to a person at all (e.g. our webmaster tools let people diagnose lots of issues without talking to a webmaster expert at Google). We try to pursue scalable communication methods such as forums and keeping an eye on the blogosphere too. I wouldn't claim that we're perfect--I'd be curious to hear more about the AdWords issue that you had--but our first instinct is to look for ways so that people don't need to telephone Google in the first place. I think a lot of companies do that; I can't remember the last time I needed to talk to Amazon or Facebook or Netflix on the phone, for example. But I take your point, and while we do have support channels, I think it's good to keep an eye out for blog posts because that feedback can help us improve so that future people interacting with Google don't get as frustrated.
  - dhimes 17y ago
    Sorry, Matt. Yahoo has excellent customer service. Why can't Google do the same? They can, they just won't until they are forced to.
  - patio11 17y ago
    http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/01/my-adwords-are-turned-off-scary-stuff/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/01/my-adwords-are-turned-of... Here's the short version of my recent experience: Half of my business comes from AdWords and I'm pretty happy with it. Actually, you could go substantially farther than that: I'm literally a case study for it, recommend it any chance I get, and despite what I'm about to tell you continue to recommend it. One day, for no reason I could be certain of, AdWords just stopped serving my ads. Google's automated diagnostic said that you had no credit card on file for my account. That was contrary to reality, as you had already successfully billed me for $300 that week and about $12k total. I respect that you would rather I use the self-help automated diagnostic, FAQ, and whatnot. But either the diagnostic was broken or your data was, and the FAQ didn't address "What to do if our diagnostic tells you untrue things". So I tried to contact support. After digging through about 5 separate redirects to get to "contact an AdWords representative", I wrote up a detailed bug report (or as detailed as the 512 character limit would accept) and sent it in. As for what I got back, you can read the above blog post, but it was non-responsive and appears to be computer generated for me. In the wake of the above blog post and further attempts to use the "scalable communication methods", I was contacted by an AdWords representative. This is now several days after I had first contacted Google. She successfully summarized my issue (which proves that she was not a computer -- an oddly comforting notion to me by this point) and said she would escalate it to a specialist to investigate. That was a month ago. I still haven't heard back. On the plus side, the symptom which was of most immediate concern to me (my sales dropping by half because my AdWords ads were not showing) recovered before I missed my entire busy season, and things are more or less normal for me now.
- calcnerd256 17y ago
  "Beware the Leopard" is only written on disused lavatory stalls.
onreact-com 17y ago
I guess you would make more webmasters happy besides yourself by making Google set up a team that deals with such issues where webmasters don't have to raise hell first to get noticed. Maybe Google should hire the 10k "permanent temps" again it spit out a few months ago during the "financial crisis" panic.
pierrefar 17y ago
What about the countless other people who can't cause a big PR fuss and therefore don't attract your attention? I'm not saying they're all innocent of ToS breaches, but neither are they all guilty, and Matt doesn't scale to look at each of these situations. The Google search results are constantly being updated with new data and new algos because Google knows that to keep the SERPs relevant, they have to keep questioning their approach and improving on it. Why isn't the same healthy self-criticism of the AdSense termination process being portrayed in public? Every week we hear the same exact story, and it's now a regular feature in the headlines.
jacquesm 17y ago
Hi Matt, No offense, but if it takes posting your gripes on HN to get customer support then something is very much broken. The simple fact that a multiple billion dollar company should depend on outside channels for its support cues is very sad imho. Maybe, instead of passing on messages like these pass the general message that Google tech support as perceived from the outside absolutely sucks. I'm not exactly a newbie on the adsense/adwords front, have spent lots of money on adwords before giving up because of inactivity on googles part dealing with click fraud, still using adsense because of a lack of alternatives.
- Alex3917 17y ago
  We're talking about a website that normally gets 100 page views per day. Are you saying that Google should hire thousands of full-time employees to service customers who each only account for ten or fifteen bucks worth of business a year?
  - netsp 17y ago
    You can get just as bad with a $100,000 account.
  - igrekel 17y ago
    If one percent of them call once in a year, why not? I can call a toll-free number about the 1 dollar pack of gum I bought. I don't get stellar interaction but it is still more than what we are talking about.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    If you can not make it work for sites that have 100 page views per day then you should not accept them. Once you accept them you have to support them.
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    Flip side: HN apparently expects that Apple should have enough people on staff to provide timely, professional support to developers whose apps might never sell as many as a hundred copies total.

As happy as I am that you're Google's unofficial ombudsman, Matt, you're a big billion dollar company who many of us are intensely reliant on for our businesses. There needs to be a support channel other than "make a PR issue for Google and Matt Cutts will swoop by to save the day". I had a big issue with AdWords earlier this month. Google made it all but impossible for me to reach anyone about it. Earlier this year, I had an issue with my bank denying an AdWords bill (to protect me against possible fraud). It took one minute on the phone to resolve. You make a hundred times what my bank does off me. Why is human contact only possible if we speak the secret password into the telephone disguised as a shoe which is stored in the unused broom closet marked Beware of Leopard.

pavs 17y ago
I couldn't agree more. Much smaller companies with much smaller capital have options to contact for support issues in a person to person basis. With Google Adwords, it is virtually non-existant. Considering the fact that you have to either really screw up or get a lot of attention to yourself for Google to get to you, without that you are out of luck. Automated response is not a solution to all problems.
bk 17y ago
Here's my thinking: 1. Google knows how to scale computers, and perhaps engineering teams, but not people in general. 2. "You make a hundred times what my bank does off me" - Exactly, and hiring pesky call center employees, who would have to be good on top of it, would ruin Google's profit/stock price. We're all desperate, depending on practically the only ad game in town, so we bark but have no bite. A higher-end (aka non-cpc|cpm) revenue model is the only way out, I'm afraid.
- barrkel 17y ago
  I don't agree that costs throughout the system need to rise. If people want (or need) a higher level of support, they should be able to pay for it, preferably on a pay as you go model with refunds for genuine grievances.
- lsc 17y ago
  there are other ad networks. uh, look at my other comments. Personally, I think you are right that 'cost per click' and 'cost per impression' are both easy to game. The auction model, I think, might mean the beginning of a better way. Essentially, advertisers bid on what they are willing to pay per day. (now, personally, I think project wonderful's implementation is slightly flawed, but it is moving in the correct direction.)
pg 17y ago
Though it may not be a complete answer, it is encouraging that people from Google will reply on public forums. You'd never see an Apple employee posting on a thread about someone whose iPhone app had been sitting in the pipeline for months, or a Paypal employee posting on a thread about someone whose account had been summarily frozen.
- silencio 17y ago
  On the other hand, the Google employee who has answered here is Matt Cutts. I doubt many lesser-known employees at Google have the luxury of replying outside of official company forums and sites in such a manner. From personal experience, finding an Apple employee who can even find out what is going on with an iPhone app waiting for review for months can be difficult if not impossible without connections inside the company. However, if you have a development-related question or a bug report you want looked at, there's plenty of Apple employees on Twitter that would be happy to answer such as Chris Espinosa (a manager on the Xcode team and Apple employee #8, @cdespinosa) and Michael Jurewitz (developer tools evangelist, @jurewitz).
  - andreyf 17y ago
    FWIW, I've seen "lesser-known" Google employees get people in touch with the right teams.
- shiranaihito 17y ago
  I'd wager that he's offering to help not because Google is such a friendly and benevolent business entity, but because it's in the spirit of Hacker News (and ultimately, in Google's best interest to do so). The credibility of Don't Be Evil is taking a lot of hits these days. Some of us were never really convinced.
  - lucifer 17y ago
    I fail to see how this is "evil". The evil one worries about in context of a company like Google is information privacy.
MattCutts 17y ago
There is a support channel for appeals, and it sounds like hizook.com submitted an appeal via that channel earlier this week. My guess is that the Google team is already looking into it; I just wanted to let people know that I'd ask the relevant team from my side as well. Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would be difficult to have one-on-one conversations with all of them even if everyone at Google did nothing but try to provide that support. Historically, we try to tackle that challenge by reducing the need to talk to a person at all (e.g. our webmaster tools let people diagnose lots of issues without talking to a webmaster expert at Google). We try to pursue scalable communication methods such as forums and keeping an eye on the blogosphere too. I wouldn't claim that we're perfect--I'd be curious to hear more about the AdWords issue that you had--but our first instinct is to look for ways so that people don't need to telephone Google in the first place. I think a lot of companies do that; I can't remember the last time I needed to talk to Amazon or Facebook or Netflix on the phone, for example. But I take your point, and while we do have support channels, I think it's good to keep an eye out for blog posts because that feedback can help us improve so that future people interacting with Google don't get as frustrated.
- dhimes 17y ago
  Sorry, Matt. Yahoo has excellent customer service. Why can't Google do the same? They can, they just won't until they are forced to.
- patio11 17y ago
  http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/01/my-adwords-are-turned-off-scary-stuff/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/01/my-adwords-are-turned-of... Here's the short version of my recent experience: Half of my business comes from AdWords and I'm pretty happy with it. Actually, you could go substantially farther than that: I'm literally a case study for it, recommend it any chance I get, and despite what I'm about to tell you continue to recommend it. One day, for no reason I could be certain of, AdWords just stopped serving my ads. Google's automated diagnostic said that you had no credit card on file for my account. That was contrary to reality, as you had already successfully billed me for $300 that week and about $12k total. I respect that you would rather I use the self-help automated diagnostic, FAQ, and whatnot. But either the diagnostic was broken or your data was, and the FAQ didn't address "What to do if our diagnostic tells you untrue things". So I tried to contact support. After digging through about 5 separate redirects to get to "contact an AdWords representative", I wrote up a detailed bug report (or as detailed as the 512 character limit would accept) and sent it in. As for what I got back, you can read the above blog post, but it was non-responsive and appears to be computer generated for me. In the wake of the above blog post and further attempts to use the "scalable communication methods", I was contacted by an AdWords representative. This is now several days after I had first contacted Google. She successfully summarized my issue (which proves that she was not a computer -- an oddly comforting notion to me by this point) and said she would escalate it to a specialist to investigate. That was a month ago. I still haven't heard back. On the plus side, the symptom which was of most immediate concern to me (my sales dropping by half because my AdWords ads were not showing) recovered before I missed my entire busy season, and things are more or less normal for me now.
calcnerd256 17y ago
"Beware the Leopard" is only written on disused lavatory stalls.

onreact-com 17y ago

I guess you would make more webmasters happy besides yourself by making Google set up a team that deals with such issues where webmasters don't have to raise hell first to get noticed. Maybe Google should hire the 10k "permanent temps" again it spit out a few months ago during the "financial crisis" panic.

pierrefar 17y ago

What about the countless other people who can't cause a big PR fuss and therefore don't attract your attention? I'm not saying they're all innocent of ToS breaches, but neither are they all guilty, and Matt doesn't scale to look at each of these situations. The Google search results are constantly being updated with new data and new algos because Google knows that to keep the SERPs relevant, they have to keep questioning their approach and improving on it. Why isn't the same healthy self-criticism of the AdSense termination process being portrayed in public? Every week we hear the same exact story, and it's now a regular feature in the headlines.

jacquesm 17y ago

Hi Matt, No offense, but if it takes posting your gripes on HN to get customer support then something is very much broken. The simple fact that a multiple billion dollar company should depend on outside channels for its support cues is very sad imho. Maybe, instead of passing on messages like these pass the general message that Google tech support as perceived from the outside absolutely sucks. I'm not exactly a newbie on the adsense/adwords front, have spent lots of money on adwords before giving up because of inactivity on googles part dealing with click fraud, still using adsense because of a lack of alternatives.

Alex3917 17y ago
We're talking about a website that normally gets 100 page views per day. Are you saying that Google should hire thousands of full-time employees to service customers who each only account for ten or fifteen bucks worth of business a year?
- netsp 17y ago
  You can get just as bad with a $100,000 account.
- igrekel 17y ago
  If one percent of them call once in a year, why not? I can call a toll-free number about the 1 dollar pack of gum I bought. I don't get stellar interaction but it is still more than what we are talking about.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  If you can not make it work for sites that have 100 page views per day then you should not accept them. Once you accept them you have to support them.
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  Flip side: HN apparently expects that Apple should have enough people on staff to provide timely, professional support to developers whose apps might never sell as many as a hundred copies total.