My Love-Hate Relationship With Google

Because it’s so pervasive on the web Google often provokes strong emotions – usually either love or hate.  In me it provokes both.

I use a lot of Google’s services and they work very well.  If they didn’t I’d stop using them.  And some of them, like Webmaster’s Tools for example, are really good aids to making sure there are no problems with your web site as the web sees it.

But when things go wrong Google falls down badly.  It simply doesn’t provide support for anything that’s out of the ordinary.

Sure, there are FAQ’s and forums and a host of other self-help resources.  These are great if you have a common problem. But if you don’t, you’re in trouble.

Here’s what happened to me this week:

I wanted to set up a better search function on this blog and one of the services I tried was Google Custom Search.  It’s free for personal users, but they will display Adsense ads on your search results pages.

This was no big deal and, in any case, they encourage you to sign up for Adsense so you can benefit from these ads.

So I tried to sign up.

Right at the beginning of the process there’s a message that told me that if I had an existing Google account for things like Adwords, Gmail etc I should be sure to sign up using that login. No problem there, I thought.

Ha! Wrong!

I got to the point where it asked me to enter my username and password and I immediately got an error message telling me I couldn’t use those login details because someone was already using them.

Of course they are … IT’S ME!!!

I went round that loop a couple of times and then tried the help screens.

As I said above:  loads of probably excellent self-help features for all the most common problems you can think of, but absolutely nothing that came close to my problem.

And absolutely no way to get email support.

My frustration levels peaked – not because I was desperate to get Adsense, but because of the sheer arrogance they displaid in refusing to provide email support for something like this.

The sheer arrogance in assuming they’ve got all angles covered and not allowing for the possibility that there may be something they’ve not thought of.

So yes, Google does provide some excellent services.  But they’re also one of the most arrogant and frustrating organisations I’ve ever come across.

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Tagged as: google customer support, google services