Google Surveys Sunset | Hacker News Reader

Google Surveys Sunset

support.google.com

88 pointsubershmekel52 comments

> "While we believe in our mission of enabling businesses of all sizes to run custom market research with an easy to use and affordable tool, we do not believe the existing product is the best way to do this going forward. The Surveys team will be working to find new ways to bring the scale & insights of our research network to customers via Google Ads products for advertiser, customer, and market research."

Ah, yeah this explanation makes total sense. /s

And another one bytes the dust. R.I.P. my friend, G-Surveys.

Cue comments about how Google always does this and can't be trusted or relied on for anything except for the direct revenue drivers: Gmail and Search. Because it's true.

At this point, I'm just speechless. Everything worth saying on the matter, and even a lot of things not worthy of a thot, have already been said a thousand times prior.

For better or worse, big win for Qualtrics and Typeform and big loss for anyone leveraging Gsurveys due to lack of budget.

Hey TMTD, Yep Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, and Medallia are the winners today. I'm sure they're celebrating winning the war of attrition against Goggle.

Are you thinking of Google Forms? It's often used to create surveys but they are different products. Google Surveys essentially created those "answer a survey to access this webpage" popups and has a very limited free tier.

I mean Google basically lost in this market. If Google Surveys were an independent company, it would have gone under already. Would you rather they keep propping up failing products forever? That seems anticompetitive.

If it were an independent company they wouldn't have let it rot so miserably because they would have incentives to pay attention to it.

Just to clarify for those confused, this is not Google Forms. Google Surveys was apparently an entire separate product.

Oh huh. Hadn't even heard of Google surveys then. Thanks for the clarification.

Yes. See the product page of Google Surveys:

https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/surveys/

How surveys can hel

Yep, that's the view on my MacBook Air M2

https://i.imgur.com/PLofWAT.png

LOL. Google built a product so similar to an existing product that customers have trouble telling them apart. Why? So they could cancel it. And so somebody could get a promotion for launching a new product. Oh Google, never change.

Hey now, let’s not chastise a major provider of 300k+/year dev jobs too much ;)

These products aren't actually very similar from what I can tell, it's just that Google Surveys has a very niche use case and Google Forms is often used to create surveys.

Forms is just for the folks you already have signed up. Survey was more like SurveyMonkey and allowed you to reach new audiences (with a nice paid option to use Google search services).

The two products have nothing to do with each other, Surveys is (was) for market research and it finds participants for you and it charges per response. Forms is a free general purpose tool for forms you send to contacts you have.

You appear to be confused by the similar names only.

Not too different from using Google Forms to create a form anybody can fill out, and then buying search ads to get people to fill it out, is it now?

Actually, it's totally different. Nobody's going to click on a search ad to fill out a survey, that won't work at all for those low-cost surveys.

Google Surveys wound up being shown in order to access content -- I think it was before YouTube videos, or in order to access an article without ads/paywall on select sites. There was also a dedicated app that would pay you a small amount of money.

If you don't actually know anything about Surveys, maybe you don't need to be commenting about it. :)

Hey thanks for explaining it to me! :)

It must be kind of depressing to be a goog c-suite exec. Even backed with that enormous market power and basically unlimited development and promotional budget no project you undertake ever works out. Why is that? Not regulation? Not being squashed by a bigger player. Why does it always seem to go wrong?

I guess this is why they try to leverage that market power to rob their customers by shoving ads in front of organic search results to try and make you pay to get the first hit on a google search of your own unique brand name. Ramping up ads on youtube while screwing the creators and so on. Revenue growth by customer abuse works. At least for a while.

Any business probably has to look at doing a proper risk assessment of having google as a supplier. Their search market dominance means they can, and no doubt do, laugh at those concerns while thumbing their nose at their customers. What else are customers going to do? Then buying ever more washington influence. Is that kind of arrogance the appearance of IBM style cracks in the behmoth? Or not yet? Is it inevitable given failure after failure after failure?

> Even backed with that enormous market power and basically unlimited development and promotional budget no project you undertake ever works out.

I mean maybe... This product was around for 10 years. That's a pretty long time and by many measures means it was successful.

hehe shutting it down because it couldn't compete and it was never profitable is an interesting measure of "successful" even for these c-suite types that love re-branding abject failure as success. I guess you're right. That's what they'd have to do for their egos as they cry into their money... :S

In this thread: people getting mad about Google dropping a product they've never heard of, let alone used.

At least the Opinion Rewards app isn't going away.

I've made $177 over the years. Not a fortune but it paid for a bunch of app buys and movie rentals.

I used to live right next to a rather large storage company. Every single time I left and came home, it would ask if I visited it. Click no, get 38 cents. I almost felt bad after weeks of doing this, but decided to turn location off as I found it creepy.

Did you pay with a credit card? /s

Data point: I just got kicked off Google Opinion Rewards this past week, with a message that it was no longer supported for Google Workspace (née G Suite née Google Apps née Gmail For Your Domain), which I use for my personal domain. At least they cashed out my 85¢ to Paypal. They suggested I use a personal Google Account instead, but that's kind of pointless since 99% of the surveys I got were either tied to activity on Google Search or using location data collected by Google Maps.

pathetic, lol. that being said, it's important to note that this is not the same thing as Google Forms.

I'm surprised they'd cancel this. this is one of those things Google is uniquely positioned to do.

> Another one bites the dust

> And another one gone and another one gone

> Another one bites the dust

> Hey I'm gonna get you too

> Another one bites the dust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEEd

Bookers should open bets on what service google is going to discontinue next

Did anyone here actually use this product?

As far as I can see, it allowed paid surveys to ask users a question within a custom android app, within YouTube in the pre roll ad slot, and within 3rd party sites in ad slots.

However, all 3 of those places also had internal surveys done by Google to ask questions like "Which of these brands have you seen an ad for in the past 24 hours?".

I'm not sure if I saw a single survey through Google Surveys in my 10 years on the internet... So it must have been a really niche product.

I think almost nobody will miss this product but it doesn't stopp all the "lol Google turned off another thing" comments. I'm not sure I've ever seen one of these either, certainly not in the past 5 years.

Yes, it was actually an utterly fantastic tool for product managers. You could get hard data on consumer perceptions of pretty much anything, overnight, to put into presentations.

A lot of responses would be garbage but a couple of control questions in there would filter that out.

Is this the same thing as google forms surveys, or something else?

That's something else. It's (it was) a marketing product.

> Google Surveys is a market research tool that allows you to easily create online surveys in order to make more informed business decisions. Users complete survey questions in order to access high quality content around the web, and publishers get paid as their users answer the surveys. Google automatically aggregates and analyzes responses, providing the data to you in a simple online interface.

See https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/surveys/

Can't wait for the Onion article proclaiming that Google is discontinuing Google Search. Or will it be an Onion article? Maybe Google will come up with some alternative that can further advance their ad business.

Deprecate search results for all keywords, only serve search ads?

Remove the ability to search for keywords, but add a Tictok like interface. The AI will then learn our preference and surface pages we want to see.

But… but… that’s just tiktok. Which probably means you’re right.

Interesting thought experiment:

What would the internet look like if Google did indeed sunset Google Search?

Would a lot actually change? For people doing SEO probably yes, but as a user who switched all my browsers to default to DuckDuckGo some time ago already I think I'd barely notice it (as that switch was barely noticeable as well).

This product seemed like it had a great deal of promise after they nailed the results of the 2012 U.S. election, in which numerous national polls said Romney would prevail. But they totally whiffed it in 2016, so it might have just been dumb luck.

Google Survey's website makes no mention of them pulling the plug. Guess new users will find out the hard way. https://surveys.google.com/

C'mon! With Google, every product is in danger of being deprecated. I was always giving them the benefit of the doubt but not anymore.

I think there was an alternative on HN a while back.

Nothing spells 'Care for customers' like pulling the plug and allowing 2 whole months to get their data out.

My first reaction to the following combinations of words “Google announces” and “Google deprecates” is “whatever”.

The answer to the question: What if 20th Century Fox made software?

i wonder when people will learn not to depend on anything these megacompanies make, ESPECIALLY google.

I truly hope google suddenly has some twisted plan to kill gmail. Though I doubt it

Lmao we use these all the time at my employer.

Someday, we'll read, "Google is deprecating Google."

“Google is deprecating search.”

"Google is deprecating Alphabet."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com