MattCutts

Hey Tim, your blog post mentioned the [recency microsoft word misspelled] query. The way I normally check if a word is valid is just do a query for the word, e.g. [recency]. In the top right we show the phrase "Results 1 - 10 of about 2,910,000 for recency" and "recency" will be a hyperlink to a dictionary definition if we recognize that as a valid dictionary word. Looking at the number of results is a good signal too.

Your "Red Room" query is hard in a couple ways. First, it looks like that root page used to have the words on the page: "The Red Room Doors open 6pm $18 Pre-Booked" And it's also tough because it looks like the name changed to the "2nd Degree Bar & Grill" at some point. The fact that you can type [red room] and get a suggestion for [red room st. lucia] is actually pretty helpful in my book because it leads you to the answer that the name changed.

I think the the results quality on Google has been the same or better over the last few months; one thing we have been looking at is helping less savvy users who might mistype a word or type extra words that they don't really need in their query. That can be a little more annoying for power users, but on the other hand the power users pick up tricks like "Use a '+' in front of a word to require Google to match that word."

Regarding the query [Linux asynchronous IO] returning older results, here's a tip. Above the search results click the "Show options" link to open up what we call "toolbelt" mode. From there, you can click to show only results from (say) the last year, or in a certain date range.

Toolbelt mode is really handy, e.g. if you search for a product, you can click "Show options" and then click the "Fewer shopping sites" link to get more reviews and manufacturer pages instead of comparison shopping sites.

Or the dangers of companies not allowing you to easily export/backup your data.

"I doubt that anyone who is using Google for search purposes will need to contact customer support."

You'd be surprised. There's still some people who think that when they type in a query, people at Google manually decide which results to show. For every result on the page. For every query. Hundreds of millions of times a day.

A lot of those searchers do a search for "John Smith" and then want to talk about why their school friend John Smith wasn't #1 instead of that other John Smith.

That's doesn't negate your point; I'm just saying that orders of magnitude more people want to contact Google than there are Google employees, and many of those people want to have prolonged discussions with Google. So the challenge is to find scalable ways to communicate with those people.

barrkel, I can speak to some of the thinking on the search result ranking side. I believe the feeling has been that asking people to pay for support creates worse incentives, because it turns something that people shouldn't have to do (contact Google for support) into a source of revenue.

It's a similar situation to pay-for-inclusion in the search index: a search engine should include as many pages/sites in its index as possible, and if someone can pay the search engine to include their site, then it creates a weird incentive for the search engine to not do a great job of crawling the web.

At least on the organic/ranking side, that's at least part of the reason why Google has never done pay-for-inclusion or pay-for support for webmasters.

I'm glad that the ads are running again. Reading through your blog post, it seems entirely possible that the @welcome variable not being defined could cause an issue with conversion tracking (although I don't have any first-hand knowledge). I wonder if the AdWords rep worked to make sure that the issue got escalated/resolved, but was working under the impression that you didn't need to be contacted back afterwards?

calambrac, I personally agree with you about the wording/tone of the current letter. I would like them to take a look at changing that, although no one will ever be delighted to get that letter.

I like the way you think! I tweeted to you to prove this account is really me: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/3603379916

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 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.

I'm happy to ask the right team at Google about this and point them to the post on hizook.com.