Why Is Google So Hard To Contact? Options

[bwelford]

Yesterday evening I spotted a major error on the Home Page for Google Blogsearch. The two hyperlinks towards the bottom of the page are incorrect. So I prepared an e-mail message to alert Google to the problem.

I note on the Home page for Blog Search that the hyper links for the two bottom links are incorrect.  
The Google Home page link is given as  http://www.com./
and the About Google Blog Search link is given as  http://www.com./help/about_blogsearch.html
 
www.com. is not a useful domain
 
Please confirm that this message has been received.  I trust it will be of help.

I then had to figure out where to send my message. Search as I could on the Google website, I could not find an appropriate e-mail address. Only journalists are given a way of contacting Google. So I sent this message to press@google.com and asked them to pass it on.

I think Google is doing so many things well, but I give them a big zero on ways of contacting them. Why is such a big organization so difficult to reach? Do you think they should make it easier?

[JohnMu]

I really don't want to know the volume of mail that they receive. :-)

I've sent mails to help @ google.com and have usually received a short autoanswer that it has been sent to the correct group within a day, often a short real-answer a day after that. Just make sure you post relevant keywords in title + header tags, ehm: in the subject and message and their system seems to route it pretty good.

It's almost surreal how hard it seems to reach them, but I suppose the fewer direct mail addresses they have on their sites, the easier it is to filter the important stuff out.

Sometimes their services will have an associated "Google Group", where you can also post these sort of things. I've noticed that they really follow them (when it is the official group) and even if they don't respond (they hardly do, I suppose because it all has to go through PR) they put it on their lists and fix things really fast (I'm amazed at their speed, especially with their size and number of languages they need to keep in synch).

John

[bwelford]

Where did you find the e-mail address, help@google.com, softplus. :?

[Scratch]

I know several deities and a number of dead people who are easier to contact than Google :-)

Seriously, I can totally appreciate why G doesn't want to enter into too many conversations with the great unwashed... You can just imagine:

"Your search engine sucks. I can't find my brother's site on it"
"How do I find recipies for apple strudel?"
"Where the hell has my site gone from your rankings?!!"
"Why has my PageRank gone down?"
"How relevant is PageRank?"
"What the hell IS PageRank?"
"Texas casino poker gambling viagra cialis porn etc."

[bwelford]

So I guess what's good for Google should be good for all of us, eh?

[JohnMu]

Hi Barry,
I found it "all over the web" :-) - I can't remember where I found it first, but it has been mentioned in several of the groups and forums.

After searching Google for it's address (he he, easy when you know which one to search for), I found:
http://www.google.com/intl/en_extra/contac...act/search.html

However, I can't seem to find the click-path to get to that page..

MSN (not Google) finds the following page linking to it:
http://www.google.com/intl/en_extra/help.html
which seems to be the old version of
http://www.google.com/intl/en_extra/help/

I would assume the page is obsolete / abandoned, so it looks like Google wants to hide those addresses. <sigh>

[JohnMu]

That reminds me of: http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html

Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

    \"Dear google.com,
    I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories...\" 

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for \"burn fat at night\" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

he he he. Worth a try, I guess :mrgreen:

[Scratch]

Barry, I think common sense dictates how easy it should be for someone to contact you.

Sometimes, "Contact Us" needs to be very prominent.

Sometimes, it needs to be non-existent. See e.g.: http://www.nsa.gov/home_html.cfm

Sometimes, you want to make it possible for people to contact you if they *really* need to. I wonder how many telphone queueing systems make me wait 5 minutes as a matter of course, not because there's no-one to answer my call, but because they know only the 10% who *really* need to get through will bother sticking around...

It all depends on: a) Your business goals and what needs to happen for those to be met, and Economics.

[bwelford]

There's obviously merit in what you're saying, Scratch. However I think there's something more fundamental here. I believe the Internet is about communication and about relationships. By being easy to contact, it's more likely that you establish that you're a good group or individual with which to develop some kind of relationship.

Otherwise you're more likely to appear like the Wizard of Oz.

[JohnMu]

Scratch, you've probably hit it there - economics :-).

However, on nsa.gov, just click on "about" and "contact" and you can find an email address to send mails to. I'm just not quite sure why I would contact them, but just in case :-) -- also, they seem to have their departments all listed there as well, with mail and tel-numbers. Now that would be great to have for Google!

[Paul_H]

For one site I was getting a lot of dumb emails so removed all contact info, accept the contact form which now just harvests emails for some later use.

Wonder if G do the same?

[bwelford]

Great, Paul_H. Now where did I see that Google Contact Form? :?

[Jammer]

First guess, right @ once:
http://www.google.com/contact/

If you ask me, they couldn't have made it any easier

[bragadocchio]

Funny, I was imagining the amount of email that Google receives everyday last night while rereading The Anatomy of a Search Engine when I got to this passage:

It turns out that running a crawler which connects to more than half a million servers, and generates tens of millions of log entries generates a fair amount of email and phone calls. Because of the vast number of people coming on line, there are always those who do not know what a crawler is, because this is the first one they have seen. Almost daily, we receive an email something like, \"Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?\" 

...

Since large complex systems such as crawlers will invariably cause problems, there needs to be significant resources devoted to reading the email and solving these problems as they come up.

[bwelford]

Sorry, Jammer, but that isn't the answer. I passed through that page several times as I banged my head against the wall. The only way I could have used anything on that page is if I wanted to suggest
• Business Proposals Contact us at bizdev@google.com
I hardly think they'll be willing to pay me for pointing out these errors on their Google Blog Search Home Page.

[gabs]

You can always phone them... phone: 0-207-025-8010

Best thing to do is guess the extension number ...

[bwelford]

Actually I've just noticed that I may have been the victim of a hoax. :oops: It doesn't in any way change the difficulties of contacting Google and indeed they may wish to act on what I've now noticed. However it isn't Google's fault.

I had used a link in some article or other when I first checked out the Google Blog Search. I bookmarked the link and have been using that ever since. However I now notice that the bookmark has the following URL http://blogsearch.google.com./ Notice that '.' after the com and before the /. If you use that link then you end up at an apparent Google Blog Search that has the 'wrong' links mentioned in my first post.

If you use the correct URL http://blogsearch.google.com/ then you have no problems, the links are correct

So this is all done by the owners of www.com. If you do a WebBug check on that you GET the following:

--------------------------------------------------------------
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Server: Resin/2.1.14
Cache-Control: no-cache
Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=aNYMzXI6el5b; path=/
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 266
Set-Cookie: Coyote-2-3fd75bc8=ac10080e:0;Max-Age=600;Path=/
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:42:01 GMT


<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=/jsp/browsercast-mastermessagewerks/microsite/index.html? action=searchstyle&action=search&afID=5950&keywords=">
</head>
</html>
------------------------------------------------------

Was this done because they could do it, or is there something else involved here? I'm also intrigued that a domain name without a TLD works. Can anyone throw any light on this?

[Jammer]

It's not a domain without a TLD, try www.www.com
It's not a hoax either, it's just a programming fault at Google.

By the way, originally URL's should be read backwards and should always end with a '.' This is still the way they are processed.

[JohnMu]

Hmm, I don't think they're doing it... I can imagine that Google's server got confused by your query and just wrote the URLs incorrectly.

I.e. when I do "www.google.com." (trailing period) I go to the Google search home page, with *me logged in* - if this was on a different domain it wouldn't do that; if they framed Google then I would be able to spot the frame in the source. It looks like (I'm using Firefox) the browser is just guessing at the correct domain name, getting it and pushing the (incorrect) query to it.

Also, if I do "nslookup blogspot.google.com." then it will give me a google.com IP (not a com.com).

Therefore, I think it's just a bug in Google's site (something for them to fix... where was that feedback form again? :mrgreen: )

John

[Paul_H]

www.com is the domain

www.com is a valid domain and was registered in 1998
Remember www is normally just a subdomain, it means nothing special and was introduced after domains were in common use. Someone just happens to have bought the domain www

Most whois and other apps will not work with this domain as they strip out the www bit. Try http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml