I was reminded of this elderish blog post of yours when I read our new approach to China post on the official Google blog this morning. Maybe you want to add this announcement to your list of moments of pride to work for Google. See my tweet (I know that you are taking a week off of Twitter these days):
http://twitter.com/tomayac/status/7702282247

–Tom

There are a few recurring themes in the comments. I think one of the reasons for the mismatch between Googlers perception of the company vs non-Googlers perception is just better access to information. Often, Google has done something which I thought at first seemed stupid but on investigation turned out to have good reasons in the end. I’ve always found it profoundly ironic that our mission is to “make the worlds information accessible” but have a strong culture of secrecy. I wish it would change, but it’s not my decision to make and am not holding my breath.

Anyway, to tackle a few common complaints here in a way that hopefully does not violate confidentiality:

- Difficulty of contacting support/humans. Yes it’s frustrating. We all wish it was different. The problem is that Google has hundreds of millions of users across its (free) products and only 20,000 employees. You can see immediately the issue: even if every single employee did nothing but deal with customers, we’d still never be able to provide good one-to-one service. I don’t think there’ll ever be a good solution to this problem, so we focus on eliminating common causes of problems through better code or design rather than spending a literally infinite amount of money on one-to-one support.

- Mysterious AdSense revocations. I don’t actually know about this first hand, but would bet a few dollars that it’s for the same reason we don’t email people telling them why their mail was sent to the spam folder. If we suspect you of abusing the system, spelling out exactly why we think that would help innocent people a bit but help abusers a lot. If they are pulling 3 different tricks to avoid detection and we note only one of them in our revocation email, now you know that the other two can’t be detected. Again, I agree it’s frustrating but this is a tricky balance to strike. I’d be surprised if 100% full disclosure will ever happen.

- One guy mentioned the AppEngine problems, in fact we did publish a real post mortem

- Google Software Update being “troublesome to remove”, you can remove it by uninstalling the programs that are using it to stay up to date. Next time it wakes up, it’ll notice that nothing needs it and remove itself. This isn’t entirely intuitive, but once you know the trick it is quite easy to do.

- The risk of rogue employees. There are some pretty strong internal security systems here for protecting valuable data like logs, email, book scans etc. We obviously don’t simply rely on all employees being honest. I wish I could go into the details but I guess I can’t. I realize this boils down to “trust us, it’s under control” and that is an unsatisfying answer.

- Finally China. Ask 5 Googlers about this topic and you’ll get 5 different opinions. The original goal was to improve access to information for the Chinese. My personal opinion is shaped by a recent holiday in China. I asked the guides our tour group had what search engine they used and they all gave the same answer, Google, because it does a much better job of searching the English web than Baidu does. So I think in some objective way Google is improving access to information there, despite the censorship requirements, as if you are an English speaking Chinese person only Google provides reliable (!) access to the English web.

Microsoft never did manage to pull of what Google have despite Microsofts huge head start, I think those who use the word hate, when it comes to a resource such as Google, simply nitpick to gain the public eye,

Really, it may just be lots of geeks behind PC’s creating the worlds most powerful search engine, there is no motive other then treat them nice, keep them keen, no meaness here, I think Google have done an amazing job at creating world wide search domination by starting from the basics!

Often the perception of a company is what the company becomes, I believe that much of BING’S recent success is as much about people looking for an alternative to Google then the great new search engine BING. If I worked at Google, I would not be so quick to point out where BING’S search result short comings are, but why anyone would stop using Google?

Personally, BING has made some solid improvements, it is no Google, but it does prove that Google is not as great as it once was…

Very correct… and in the long term i think google is heading for a bigger fall in reputation than microsoft. why? simply because microsoft sold a less than perfect product of which there are alternatives.. but none the less offered ongoing support for the product, Google however does not just have a product but also a very direct influence over which companies will succeed online with it’s SERP’s and which wont… yet changes ranking rules and criteria leaving only ambiguous comments and companies/bussinesses guessing in their wake.

Microsoft were not so arrogant as to directly photograph peoples homes and then mock protests with arrogant and flippant responses.

The “geeks in mountain view” as you call yourselves need to learn, and fast… that with position and power comes responsibility as well as money!

Wake up and smell the coffee Matt… Google IS already EVIL!