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The Day Google Decided HttpWatch Was ‘Unwanted Software’
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 11y agoI have a rather ominous feeling that the removal process was triggered by automated scanning picking up certain keywords like "sniffer". In today's environment of security paranoia, unfortunately it's not hard to imagine something like that being interpreted the wrong way... Also, I think "unwanted software" is a bit opaque; what they really mean is software Google doesn't want, not necessarily the user.
- smitherfield 11y agoI'm actually surprised they ended up getting a successful outcome, given the hostile tone they took with the support person. Being hostile is usually a great way to get a "sorry, can't help you" response.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kuschku 11y agoI’m surprised anyone even takes Google seriously with the rules they try to enforce – for example the "specific uninstall instructions", even if it follows the OS standard procedure. (Tbh, I’d have just put a link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base and the Apple Support site there). Or the fact that you have to show the EULA before the download – which is also not really helpful in any way. These rules don’t really help either side (as people producing malicious ads can still do so, but people doing honest ads have to comply with rules that don’t help at all), but add more stress for both sides.
- lambda 11y agoThat doesn't sound like a terribly hostile tone. Yes, there was a little bit of hostility, but nowhere near the level that would lead a support person to give up on helping you. Remember, people in support are used to a somewhat hostile tone. People get in touch when something is wrong, and so it's fairly common for people to be frustrated. If they just responded with "sorry, can't help you" to every support query with a slightly hostile tone, they wouldn't be providing much support. And yes, it is also good to try and assume good faith and not vent your frustration at a support person who had nothing to do with whatever issue it is that you're frustrated about. But it's a fact of life in support that you'll have to deal with some unhappy people, so you need to be able to deal with it.
- hackuser 11y ago> Remember, people in support are used to a somewhat hostile tone. My experience is that support personnel often get worn out by so many hostile interactions and become more reactive to them.
- Quarrelsome 11y agoand that's the difference between someone good at the job and someone average.
- konstruktor 11y agoI re-read the conversation after reading your comment, and find them assertive but not hostile.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hartator 11y agoYeah, it's missing the "Hi", "Thanks"... Mistakes are made, support people are usually not the one responsible. I've a business that > $1M with Google too and I aim to be kind even if they screw up and even if it's a lot of money. That's said Google is going down hill for a while now.
- wasyl 11y agoI'm surprised by (in my opinion) mostly neutral tone, when service they paid so much for is cancelled without warning
- cordite 11y agoThis kind of stuff could easily be resolved by including a specific and complete list in the first place. Telling someone they aren't presentable isn't the same as telling a mostly well dressed person that the host wants them to wear dark socks with their dress shoes instead of white socks. (Hopefully this analogy is fitting.)
- wavefunction 11y agoFashion is a matter of taste, isn't it, and ultimately as void of real meaning as the renderings of the "Opinion of Google"? I suppose perhaps your analogy fits more well than you perhaps expected, but not in Google's favor.
- tankenmate 11y agoGiven the fact that Google don't follow their own guidelines (I checked their desktop and android download pages) it would be interesting to hear the EU competition commission's point of view given their current objections to Google's behaviour regarding adwords.
- oh_sigh 11y agoPerhaps it's because Google is not advertising on those websites?
- dangrossman 11y agoThey are. The first search result for "google chrome" is an AdWords ad that links directly to the download page.
- oh_sigh 11y agoOh okay, I misunderstood the rules. I thought it was about displaying ads on the website itself, not ads that link to the website.
- timothya 11y agoI just checked the Chrome desktop[0] and Android SDK[1] download pages, and both do follow the guidelines - clicking on the download button reveals the EULA which the user must agree to prior to downloading the software. [0]: https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/ https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/ [1]: https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
- th0br0 11y agoFor the Android page, however, you could argue that they don't follow their own guide lines. Click "Other download options". The EULA dialog only appears if the user clicks the link with his left mouse button as it seems to be a purely client-side interception. Should he, however, use right-click->save as or open in new tab he is not presented with the dialogue.
- gaadd33 11y agoI wonder if Google takes reports about Google pages not following their polices seriously. Also I wonder if the same guidelines apply for major software websites, I don't think download.com follows most of these requirements.
- x0x0 11y agoSubmit your report to the european anti-trust commission.
- omnibrain 11y agoFrom the title I expected a piece about how this affected their business. Graphs showing downloads before, during and after; etc.
- frade33 11y agocouple of years back, adwords suspended my account. the only response i wrote back was, I have no intentions either, of paying my money to a company that has little to no respect to its customers. I got back instant response and got my account reinstated, but, still I didn't agree, I asked him, I need written apology from the head manager, the support person apologized for this, and said the head manager is traveling overseas. So I accepted. I never asked the reason why they did it in the first place. I was just furious, you don't say fuck off to your customers, without first talking to them.
- varelse 11y agoYet another sign that Scott Locklin was dead-on about Google having become Fat Elvis: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-fat-elvis/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-fat-... And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level of search quality. I find this frustrating because I hate Google for its A/B testing and blind-allocated mediocrity, and yet, everything else continues to be worse. It's like being married to someone you truly despise (at least for me, your mileage may vary). I really don't get why no one can disrupt them. But clearly they can't...
- bad_user 11y agoI just read that article and I've lost at least 10 minutes out of my life that I'll never get back. It's amongst the worst links I ever followed on HN.
- seanp2k2 11y agoAgree. I agreed with the first few paragraphs of the article, but when they called autocomplete and Gmail retarded I could barely keep reading. They went on to defend content farms, claimed that they're useful, and noted that any sensible search engine algorithm should be able to avoid them. The article sounds as if it's written by someone who operates a link farm, uses AOL for email, and has no clue how web search works. The imagery of Google as Fat Elvis is enough for a good chuckle, though.
- varelse 11y agoGmail is an atrocity of a once great service, possibly the easiest component of Google to disrupt (all IMO of course) I am on a 6 Mbps connection and I regularly have to kill my Gmail window or else it hogs the bandwidth, memory leaks until it crashes my browser (Firefox), or slows the entire browser to a crawl for any other window. I see no such issues with facebook, twitter, or any other web site I visit regularly. Then there's all the weird javascript idiosyncracies when one wants to reply to a message and the compose window won't appear unless I open a new tab. Sigh... And don't even get me started on the abomination that Chrome has become, possibly IMO, because so much of its original team has long since left Google (ex-googler myself who knew many of them).
- sundarurfriend 11y ago>Simtec: How come there isn’t one here? https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/ https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/ >Google Support: Lol >Simtec: No really? >Google Support: That’s a great question This is the most telling part of the conversation to me. Not just for the hypocrisy others have mentioned, but for the attitude of the Support rep that it reveals. The rep feels so powerless and so disconnected from their own company that a resigned laugh is their first response to an inconsistent rule. The few companies that manage to have mostly excellent support folks are the ones that: 1. Keep the support guidelines clear and sensible, and more importantly 2. Give the support folk the power to make internal changes (or at least to start discussions) when they aren't sensible or consistent. Amazon has done very well along these lines, while Google apparently still doesn't trust Support enough to do this.
- byuu 11y agoIf that's a full and accurate transcript; then there's a lot of things deeply wrong with that. If you pay a company over a million dollars in advertising fees, you'd expect a phone call prior to service cancellation. And you damn sure wouldn't expect a chat window analyst to say "lol" to you when you pointed out their own hypocrisy. I know they like young employees there, but are they staffing their customer support team with teenagers now? I get sense of humor, but there's a time and a place. A customer just had their account blocked, now's not the time to be anything but apologetic. Customer Service 101 stuff here.
- Quarrelsome 11y agoI thought the "lol" was one of the first things that support guy did _right_. They demonstrated a disturbing lack of empathy with the rightful outrage of the client. The "lol" was the first point in that conversation where you see the support staff essentially saying: "I think you have a point".
- davidgerard 11y ago> If you pay a company over a million dollars in advertising fees, you'd expect a phone call prior to service cancellation. And you damn sure wouldn't expect a chat window analyst to say "lol" to you when you pointed out their own hypocrisy. I know they like young employees there, but are they staffing their customer support team with teenagers now? The great thing about Google is that they don't just treat the end users with contempt - they treat the paying customers with the same contempt! (seriously, try getting support for a paid-for GApps problem)
- tw04 11y agoFor future reference; being a dick to the guy in support trying to help you doesn't really do much to help the situation. It typically only results in you getting less help - nobody has the desire to go the extra mile for someone who starts out with that kind of tone. I get you're mad at "google", but taking it out on an employee tasked with helping fix your issues is kind of like being an asshole to a waitress...
- codexon 11y agoBut you have to realize that at Google, that person is your only point of contact. Making your displeasure known to at least 1 person who works there gets your message across better than sucking it up and letting them think it isn't really such a big deal.
- icebraining 11y agoThat's only if the support rep has any way of passing the information that the client was displeased up the chain. I find that unlikely.
- codexon 11y agoUnlikely is better than nothing, that's my point.
- byuu 11y agoOf course it does no good at all to get mad at the rep. But I think it's pretty reasonable that someone's going to be upset after receiving a no-notice suspension e-mail after spending a million dollars with a company. It's pocket change to Google, sure, but that's a lifetime's income for a lot of us. Speaking as someone who worked in AOL's billing department in 2000-2002, I can say that we all know very well not to take this stuff personally. It's just what the job is, and it's not for the feint of heart. I'd love it if everyone were nicer too, but I can easily put myself in their shoes in cases like this. Now the people that were 100x ruder to me on a personal level over a $20 charge on their dialup account that was (often) their own fault? Not quite as much sympathy there :P
- huhtenberg 11y agoThis recent Google "crackdown" was making rounds in shareware circles. Basically, a shareware vendor will have their AdWords account suspended with some harsh wording and the stated reason would be that the website doesn't have either (a) uninstall instructions next to the download button (b) terms and conditions next to the download button (c) the software is of "unwanted" type (d) some other random thing (that was A-OK before) not being quite up to sniff. All in all, it looks just some random nitpicking that will go away only if the matter is escalated, which takes several weeks to process. The general sentiment seems to be that Google no longer gives a flying f*ck about smaller AdWords customers and/or some run-away manager is basically having a field day with enforcing arbitrary clauses of their AdWords T&C. What's going on in reality - nobody knows because of how "open" and communicative on the issue Google is.
- skymt 11y agoBefore Google's new terms for software AdWords, it was extremely common for scumbags to wrap freeware or OSS in spyware and buy ads for the software's name. Users would click what looked like the first result, land on what looked like a legitimate download page, and end up with something ugly like Conduit. I'm the "computer geek" for some friends and family, so I've fixed up a good number of PCs, and AdWords has been by far the #1 vector for malware. A lot of people in my position just started installing ad blockers on every PC they work on, to save trouble later. Google's new approach has a lot of problems, obviously, but they're not just power-tripping.
- x0x0 11y agoSo instead of punishing the people who eg wrapped vlc in spyware, they decided to screw over good actors? I think the clear difference is the wrong thing was easy for google to do (though unlikely to actually help at all -- nobody reads eula or uninstall directions), and the right thing -- directly targeting the bad actors and booting them from adwords -- would have taken work and money. Yet another reason google is untrustworthy.
- skymt 11y ago
- mcintyre1994 11y agoI find the hypocrisy especially interesting given that a few years they demoted Chrome for breaking a paid link rule. It certainly seems like this is another blatant broken rule by the Chrome team - not that it's their fault because they were probably never told about the rule either.
- pasbesoin 11y agoA great example of Google "Do as I say, not as I do." Re "How do I uninstall this?" Google Cloud Print appeared to be, at least on Win XP a couple of years ago and when set up to share a non-Cloud-Print-native printer, a one-way process. That borked non-Cloud printing (how the printer used to work; functionality that was desired to continue) pretty thoroughly. I like a lot of things about Google and their products. However, lack of communication on topics such as these more than borders on arrogance. P.S. OT, but: And where is Lolipop for my 2013 Moto-X (then a Google product) from Verizon. I bought it in good part because, unlike other Verizon mobile products, timely updates were "promised" strongly as part of the marketing and promotion. (And yeah, I need Verizon for specific reasons...) Now? Bupkiss. With the better part of a year left on my two-year contract (that I entered hesitantly but again, at least with this "promise" as some comfort/reassurance). Google is enormously selective in their "support" and not infrequently refuses to go out of their way when it does not support the initiative du jour. (E.g. but not only nor primarily, insisting the pressure stay on Verizon to apply these updates.)
- brohoolio 11y agoThose Adwords support folks make like $10 an hour and are employed by third parties. I'm surprised you had a good resolution.
- ponytech 11y agoThe funnier part: Google is listed as one of their customers on their home page! http://www.httpwatch.com http://www.httpwatch.com
- mdekkers 11y agoAny kind of monoculture is simply a terrible thing.