What I would like to add is that we take that same original attitude and incorporate it into our everyday personal, non-business lives. Savour the flavour of helping others, our environment, people we don’t know – with the all important ingredient of not expecting returns on outlay, investment, capital or whatever. That’s the goodwill that will still brighten our day as the financial spheres contract, crumble and fade.

Now the real point is that, as we come to develop that attitude, others, including business associates, pick up on it and appreciate its genuineness – where you’re coming from.

It’s a start and it was long overdue.

It seems google recognise that as a global brand if they open a customer service line for one and all then they’ve opened Pandoras box!

The business benefits of listening to customers accrue over the long term and over wide range of products. A customer having bad experience with Google Search is very likely to consider AdSense alternatives in monetizing their sites or use alternative advertising services. The non-communication (or minimal communication to be accurate) policy of Google search is making thousands and thousands of publishers really frustrated with Google experience (a Google search will be enough to find them; and the many publishers who are afraid that bad-mouthing Google will cause Google search to take it on them). And I am not talking about people with bad intentions trying to game the search engine. I am talking about honest publishers trying to make a living and yet finding Google search like a hegemonious dictatorship where the common people’s voice is not heard. Unless you are extremely popular and well connected you have no chance in hell of knowing what is going wrong, whether it is a bug in their algorithm or something they have done or something others have done to harm them etc. A customer recently contacted me to stop proxy sites from accessing his site which was causing Google to usurp his ranking and give it to the proxy sites instead. I am recently having a bad experience with one of my site where Google have kept the page rank but is only only indexing the front page and irrelevant tag pages and tons of incorrect pages but not the content pages from sitemap! What is going on? God only knows.

Google search at this point is like an *essential service* for web and web economy. The lack of viable alternatives is making it more so. As such it increases the responsibility of Google to show more transparency and goodwill and fairness to all. Otherwise despite Google apparent hegemony at this time will not last and I hope it doesn’t come to that stage where government or other regulatory bodies are forced to intervene.

A good company is not only about giving shareholder value but also helping the community at large. Google made a nice start with its do no evil mantra. It should consider investing more in listening to customer at least for maintaining what it promised – do no evil.

However, I believe it would have been better if I could have initiated that dialogue myself. There are times when I feel the same way about Google, times when an important issue arises that needs to be addressed privately rather than on forums. It would be great if we could initiate a question through Google Webmaster Tools, perhaps even cap it at one question per year. A conversation is better than feedback, IMHO.

But I don’t know that there’s a way that goodwill can be measured or monetized. As an individual or corporation, sometimes you just have to do things because you know they’re the right thing to do. The old fashioned word for this is “values”, and it wouldn’t show up on a spreadsheet, not even if your MBAs are from Whorton.

Lots of the public commentary is being done to gain “links” and “ad impressions” for person who is commenting. Some sites are built strictly for this purpose and those should be given low monitoring priority. Instead listen to satisfied users who talk about things that would save them time and money.

Pay special attention to where regular Google users are giving honest feedback…. and if Google follows that feed back the income of the person making the comments would DROP. Sometimes these users are actually paying their own employees to do quality control that could be automatically done by Google. For an example look at the Adsense forums where lots of people are crying for a filter that would remove certain types of ads from their websites. I know of offices where employees manually check many pages of their websites to find these ads and add them to the competitive ad filter. However, if these same offices could instead add ten words to a filter that blocked any ad that contained one of those words they could save a lot of employee time. More important the integrity of their site would be protected because visitors would not see certain types of ads on a site where that type of advertising should never appear. I’ve seen many posts about this in the adsense forums but they have been unaddressed. These people are spending valuable employee time to reduce their income. They need KW filtering that will allow them to spend employee time on tasks that increase income.

Another area where there are many satisfied google users crying for a “fix” is in Gmail. When we delete or file a post it takes us back to the inbox instead of advancing to the next message (like every other email program on this planet). Changing this would save a huge amount of time and frustration. This should be default or offered as an option. Millions of satisfied users will yell out their windows with joy when this goes live. Better to do it now than later when inefficient habits are formed in millions of minds. This will save lots of people many increments of time day in and day out.

Not sure if they listened though. Wonder if anyone at Google after does that search?