They have billions of users, it's not scalable to treat each of them individually. So, they take more scalable approaches to identify problems and assess user satisfaction. That means that an individual should expect not to have much influence over the direction the product takes and which bugs are prioritized.

Except Google's approach doesn't seem to serve the needs of any user.

Even search quality has degraded notably in the past 5 years, mainly because of the automated smartness that more hinders than helps.

I used to get answers to my problems, now i have to wade through piles of manure that is only vaguely related to what i'm searching. And they're even overhelpful. I had to plan trips with Bing maps because Google helpfully routed me around a road closed in winter. Except it was winter but I was planning a summer trip...

You can tell google maps when you're going to be making the journey. Maybe you couldn't back when you tried. Related to worse search results, I don't know. But the fact that you're finding it less relevant doesn't mean it doesn't serve the needs of any user, but that it doesn't server your needs. And that's the point. Microsoft pushes people pretty hard towards bing, yet Google keeps coming on top, I assume people know about bing but are preferring google. They only need to be better than the competition they have.

Oh, google is perfect for finding the opening hours of a pizza joint near you.

Unfortunately, it used to be perfect for more advanced searches too. Not any more.

Btw, I don't see where to enter the date when i just ask for directions on google maps. Maybe it's available in the phone app but i use the web page for planning because I can open it on a real screen...

It exists in the web UI too. You need to select the precise time and day, not just the general time of the year, but you can tell it when you want to depart or arrive. See my screenshot below. By default, the dark blue section will have "Leave now" selected.

https://rafael.kontesti.me/screenshot.png

Regarding the results, I feel like I'm better at finding things when I have no idea what I'm actually looking for. However, when I know what I'm looking for, it seems more difficult at times, I can't say it was easier before, though.

The question is if they dont' collect feedback they don't know how many users are affected. If you break feature X and all users are affected but you send them to read some FAQ and not record the reports then the only way you get informed about this is from Hacker News or a news paper, maybe this is the Google and Apple strategy, if it causes an issue that reaches a news paper then we investigate it, otherwise we fix only the bugs that upset our developers or bosses

Most of their feedback probably comes from their metrics. Things like sudden drop in the number of purchases, an unexpected increase in refinenment of certain queries, increased number of 500s, etc. In order to respond in scale you have to try to detect unusual patterns showing up in your data. That said, they do have some avenues to contacting them. There are feedback buttons in the knowledge panel and in the translations. There's an actual support in youtube (albeit it will take a while until you get to a real person) and so on. As it is, they are likely already getting more feedback than they can process on a daily basis. Bear in mind that not all feedback is useful. A big chunk of the work in any support hotline is wading through the mountain of useless feedback. I can only imagine how that'd be like at google's scale.

Note: by useless feedback I don't mean that the user is wrong because they don't understand the interface, when it's actually the interface that's not intuitive. I'm saying that people are often calling in trying to solve something completely out of your control. Just talk to anyone in support and they will tell you the craziest things that pop up. One example I've heard was a user who could not wrap around the idea that an app on the phone needs internet access to order food delivery. Something like that can easily take 30 minutes for a supporter to handle, for instance.