41–50 of 164 posts
I'm happy to ask the right team at Google about this and point them to the post on hizook.com.
Maybe Google should hire the 10k "permanent temps" again it spit out a few months ago during the "financial crisis" panic.
I'm happy to ask the right team at Google about this and point them to the post on hizook.com.
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,…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a side note, google should definitely get its act together related to customer service. This implies that they're incompetent at providing customer service. My biggest fear is that this behavior is by design, that they are achieving all their customer service objectives, and that they have the metrics to prove it.
(Meaning that they have low customer service objectives?)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
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 b…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
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 b…
Lets say I was in the OP's position and I have legitimate reasons to believe that Google is at fault here and they banned my account by mistake - but after weeks of trying they didn't get back to me (I only received automated e-mail, which are vague at explaining what going on). Assuming that scenario, my best option to get someone noticed is to make a blog post and submit it on HN and/or e-mail you about it or hope that you will notice it here?
Surely, there are better way to handle this?
This is not the only case, there are literally 1000s of such stories for many years all over the blogoshphere and forums.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
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.
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).
I'm happy to ask the right team at Google about this and point them to the post on hizook.com.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
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 b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
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 (a…
Hizook could have prevented losing advertising revenue (or at least reduced losses) by having a backup or parallel ad network on their site. So if not Google adsense, what's the next best game in town?
It's really big with the webcomics people