The Day Google Decided HttpWatch Was ‘Unwanted Software’
blog.httpwatch.com
blog.httpwatch.com
>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.
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.
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)
Instead they chose to suspend all our projects on Saturday morning, despite paying them more than $10,000/month for the rest of the projects —which had no billing issues.
We found out when all our external service monitors went crazy. Google emailed us a couple hours later and didn't restore our projects until Tuesday.
Extra credit should be given for when they informed me that they turned my personal, non-commercial / developer account to a business account because “google cloud should only be used for business”.
> Here’s a subset of our conversation with Google Support:
(emphasis mine) My reading of it was that the author appears to further denote where the conversation is snipped with ellipses:
> Google Support: Unfortunately I don’t have control over that right now but I can look into it for you
> ….
> Google Support: I looked through this, and it seemed that one of the issues was a lack of an End User Agreement (EULA)
Regardless, the blog author is trying to make a point. Removing irrelevant content is something the author should do (in my opinion), to keep the post to the point. Besides,
> How do we know that the author didn't selectively show us his conversation with Google?
…we of course have no way to verify that this is the actual conversation that took place. We assume, on good faith, that it is.
Google Support: Ah okay, So if you click the download (for Chrome) there’s a popup with the TOS
- constantly running in the background
- autoupdates
- annoying ads to install it everywhere
- comes bundled with various freeware and checked to be installed by default
- constantly phones home by default
- consumes lots of memory, eats your battery life, eats a lot of disk space and generally makes your computer less efficient
Sorry, my experiences have been far worse to the point that I am actively moving away from all things Google.
Not that it will register one iota on their corporate landscape. However, it will make me feel better and work better. And that's what matters.
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.
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.
Yet another reason google is untrustworthy.
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.
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.
Links to separate Web sites?! Better brush up on your Google policies. That'll get you banned.
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.
My experience is that support personnel often get worn out by so many hostile interactions and become more reactive to them.
That's said Google is going down hill for a while now.
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...
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.
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
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...
The imagery of Google as Fat Elvis is enough for a good chuckle, though.
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).
That said, how can one compete with them? I just switched to fastmail which is very ok at best -- I have a list of bugs, and their web client is very half assed. But I don't know that I believe there are enough people who want a good gmail and who are willing to pay eg $40/year for it to make a business if you don't have search ads making money rain out of the sky to subsidize everything else...
Every existing search engine that I'm aware of is essentially based on the PageRank algorithm, an innovation which Google created.
At the time it was created, it was not obvious that it was the best option - only that it was better than AltaVista's algorithm and Yahoo's curated portal model that were the options in 1999.
Why are search engines not innovating? Or, if they are, where are they?
In terms of innovations, there was a weird and misguided attempt to integrate "social search" into your results, which thankfully seems to have disappeared.
There is also Google's Knowledge Graph, which is a promising idea but doesn't work well yet. Search for "calories in a cup of corn" and Google's answer is wildly off. Or try "activation fee" and find out that it's $40 (huh?). It remains to be seen whether this feature can be rendered trustworthy and relevant.
This suggests that search is in fact such a hard problem that my search engine literally needs to know more about me than I know about myself to do a good job for me.
Which explains why Bing has such a hard time unseating Google - I'm always logged into GMail, so Google has known it's me doing my searches for the past eleven years.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03064573769...
YMMV, but I have been using Duckduckgo exclusively on my desktop and smartphone for half a year or so and the rare times I used Google (with "!g" prefix) during that time, I could not find better search results there either. So for all common purposes, DDG fully replaces Google for me (and I'm not a novice user who cannot tell, I've been using the web obsessively for ~20 years [and yes, AltaVista before Google]). Perhaps you should dare switch to DDG for a while and see if the illusion, that Google works better in some unspecified way, disappears.
1) The results I get in DDG are the same results I get in Bing - which means that DDG is for me just a shell around Bing. And even though DDG is not sending to Bing any cookies with my ID, well, being a power user I can and do use the Incognito/Private mode of my browser. Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help.
And the bang shortcuts of DDG are also provided by my browser. I mean, if I'm concerned with privacy, why in the world would I want to send my Google searches to DDG's servers?
2) People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably living in the US. Outside of the US, like in Europe, non-Google search results get to be like really, really bad ;-)
Also, I am not living in the USA.
I can't comment on that because I don't use Bing. Perhaps Bing would suffice as a Google replacement then? The "instant answer" type results from DDG probably do not work with Bing.
> Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help.
How would that work if GA is blocked and "!g" is used only rarely? Also, I use Tor and DDG is the only search engine that doesn't annoy me with captchas (Google's seem totally broken, often I need to solve multiple captchas for a single query - I wish people would stop linking to Google searches...).
> People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably living in the US.
No, I live in Austria. I recall complaining about search results about the time the "filter bubble" experiment by DDG ran, but the situation has greatly improved since then.
Maybe Google has adapted to what I look at, but to me it seems Google is way better as soon as a term has multiple uses (like something is a. a normal household word and b. a library/programming language/...), presenting answers for both, vs. DDG which seems to latch only on the most common meaning.
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.)
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.
I'm surprised you had a good resolution.
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.)
Also, I think "unwanted software" is a bit opaque; what they really mean is software Google doesn't want, not necessarily the user.