
The Day Google Decided HttpWatch Was ‘Unwanted Software’ - httpwatch
https://blog.httpwatch.com/2015/04/20/the-day-google-decided-httpwatch-was-unwanted-software/
======
sundarurfriend
>Simtec: How come there isn’t one here?
[https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/](https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/)

>Google Support: Lol

>Simtec: No really?

>Google Support: That’s a great question

This is the most telling part of the conversation to me. Not just for the
hypocrisy others have mentioned, but for the attitude of the Support rep that
it reveals. The rep feels so powerless and so disconnected from their own
company that a resigned laugh is their first response to an inconsistent rule.

The few companies that manage to have mostly excellent support folks are the
ones that:

1\. Keep the support guidelines clear and sensible, and more importantly 2\.
Give the support folk the power to make internal changes (or at least to start
discussions) when they _aren 't_ sensible or consistent.

Amazon has done very well along these lines, while Google apparently still
doesn't trust Support enough to do this.

~~~
byuu
If that's a full and accurate transcript; then there's a lot of things deeply
wrong with that.

If you pay a company over a million dollars in advertising fees, you'd expect
a phone call prior to service cancellation. And you _damn sure_ wouldn't
expect a chat window analyst to say "lol" to you when you pointed out their
own hypocrisy. I know they like young employees there, but are they staffing
their customer support team with teenagers now?

I get sense of humor, but there's a time and a place. A customer just had
their account blocked, now's not the time to be anything but apologetic.
Customer Service 101 stuff here.

~~~
davidgerard
> If you pay a company over a million dollars in advertising fees, you'd
> expect a phone call prior to service cancellation. And you damn sure
> wouldn't expect a chat window analyst to say "lol" to you when you pointed
> out their own hypocrisy. I know they like young employees there, but are
> they staffing their customer support team with teenagers now?

The great thing about Google is that they don't just treat the end users with
contempt - they treat the paying customers with _the same_ contempt!

(seriously, try getting support for a paid-for GApps problem)

~~~
andmarios
Same stuff goes with Google Cloud which Google advertises as “business
oriented”. We had a $20/month project that for some reason its billing account
became invalid. It was the first week of the month, billing is at the end of
the month, they could just ask us to fix the issue.

Instead they chose to suspend all our projects on Saturday morning, despite
paying them more than $10,000/month for the rest of the projects —which had no
billing issues.

We found out when all our external service monitors went crazy. Google emailed
us a couple hours later and didn't restore our projects until Tuesday.

Extra credit should be given for when they informed me that they turned my
personal, non-commercial / developer account to a business account because
“google cloud should only be used for business”.

------
huhtenberg
This recent Google "crackdown" was making rounds in shareware circles.

Basically, a shareware vendor will have their AdWords account suspended with
some harsh wording and the stated reason would be that the website doesn't
have either (a) uninstall instructions _next to the download button_ (b) terms
and conditions _next to the download button_ (c) the software is of "unwanted"
type (d) some other random thing (that was A-OK before) not being quite up to
sniff. All in all, it looks just some random nitpicking that will go away only
if the matter is escalated, which takes several weeks to process. The general
sentiment seems to be that Google no longer gives a flying f*ck about smaller
AdWords customers and/or some run-away manager is basically having a field day
with enforcing arbitrary clauses of their AdWords T&C.

What's going on in reality - nobody knows because of how "open" and
communicative on the issue Google is.

~~~
skymt
Before Google's new terms for software AdWords, it was extremely common for
scumbags to wrap freeware or OSS in spyware and buy ads for the software's
name. Users would click what looked like the first result, land on what looked
like a legitimate download page, and end up with something ugly like Conduit.

I'm the "computer geek" for some friends and family, so I've fixed up a good
number of PCs, and AdWords has been by far the #1 vector for malware. A lot of
people in my position just started installing ad blockers on every PC they
work on, to save trouble later. Google's new approach has a lot of problems,
obviously, but they're not just power-tripping.

~~~
x0x0
So instead of punishing the people who eg wrapped vlc in spyware, they decided
to screw over good actors? I think the clear difference is the wrong thing was
easy for google to do (though unlikely to actually help at all -- nobody reads
eula or uninstall directions), and the right thing -- directly targeting the
bad actors and booting them from adwords -- would have taken work and money.

Yet another reason google is untrustworthy.

~~~
skymt
The spyware ads have disappeared for me. Do you still see them? Google's
actions were too broad, but they seem to have been effective.

------
tankenmate
Given the fact that Google don't follow their own guidelines (I checked their
desktop and android download pages) it would be interesting to hear the EU
competition commission's point of view given their current objections to
Google's behaviour regarding adwords.

~~~
timothya
I just checked the Chrome desktop[0] and Android SDK[1] download pages, and
both do follow the guidelines - clicking on the download button reveals the
EULA which the user must agree to prior to downloading the software.

[0]:
[https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/](https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/)

[1]:
[https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html](https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html)

~~~
th0br0
For the Android page, however, you could argue that they don't follow their
own guide lines.

Click "Other download options". The EULA dialog only appears if the user
clicks the link with his left mouse button as it seems to be a purely client-
side interception. Should he, however, use right-click->save as or open in new
tab he is not presented with the dialogue.

------
smitherfield
I'm actually surprised they ended up getting a successful outcome, given the
hostile tone they took with the support person. Being hostile is usually a
great way to get a "sorry, can't help you" response.

~~~
lambda
That doesn't sound like a terribly hostile tone. Yes, there was a little bit
of hostility, but nowhere near the level that would lead a support person to
give up on helping you.

Remember, people in support are used to a somewhat hostile tone. People get in
touch when something is wrong, and so it's fairly common for people to be
frustrated. If they just responded with "sorry, can't help you" to every
support query with a slightly hostile tone, they wouldn't be providing much
support.

And yes, it is also good to try and assume good faith and not vent your
frustration at a support person who had nothing to do with whatever issue it
is that you're frustrated about. But it's a fact of life in support that
you'll have to deal with some unhappy people, so you need to be able to deal
with it.

~~~
hackuser
> Remember, people in support are used to a somewhat hostile tone.

My experience is that support personnel often get worn out by so many hostile
interactions and become more reactive to them.

~~~
Quarrelsome
and that's the difference between someone good at the job and someone average.

------
tw04
For future reference; being a dick to the guy in support trying to help you
doesn't really do much to help the situation. It typically only results in you
getting less help - nobody has the desire to go the extra mile for someone who
starts out with that kind of tone.

I get you're mad at "google", but taking it out on an employee tasked with
helping fix your issues is kind of like being an asshole to a waitress...

~~~
codexon
But you have to realize that at Google, that person is your only point of
contact.

Making your displeasure known to at least 1 person who works there gets your
message across better than sucking it up and letting them think it isn't
really such a big deal.

~~~
icebraining
That's only if the support rep has any way of passing the information that the
client was displeased up the chain. I find that unlikely.

~~~
codexon
Unlikely is better than nothing, that's my point.

------
varelse
Yet another sign that Scott Locklin was dead-on about Google having become Fat
Elvis:

[https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-
fat-...](https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-fat-elvis/)

And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level of
search quality.

I find this frustrating because I hate Google for its A/B testing and blind-
allocated mediocrity, and yet, everything else continues to be worse. It's
like being married to someone you truly despise (at least for me, your mileage
may vary).

I really don't get why no one can disrupt them. But clearly they can't...

~~~
lazyjones
> _And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level
> of search quality._

YMMV, but I have been using Duckduckgo exclusively on my desktop and
smartphone for half a year or so and the rare times I used Google (with "!g"
prefix) during that time, I could not find better search results there either.
So for all common purposes, DDG fully replaces Google for me (and I'm not a
novice user who cannot tell, I've been using the web obsessively for ~20 years
[and yes, AltaVista before Google]). Perhaps you should dare switch to DDG for
a while and see if the illusion, that Google works better in some unspecified
way, disappears.

~~~
bad_user
I've got 2 problems with DDG:

1) The results I get in DDG are the same results I get in Bing - which means
that DDG is for me just a shell around Bing. And even though DDG is not
sending to Bing any cookies with my ID, well, being a power user I can and do
use the Incognito/Private mode of my browser. Furthermore, your interests can
function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to
identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help.

And the bang shortcuts of DDG are also provided by my browser. I mean, if I'm
concerned with privacy, why in the world would I want to send my Google
searches to DDG's servers?

2) People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably
living in the US. Outside of the US, like in Europe, non-Google search results
get to be like really, really bad ;-)

~~~
lazyjones
> _DDG is for me just a shell around Bing_

I can't comment on that because I don't use Bing. Perhaps Bing would suffice
as a Google replacement then? The "instant answer" type results from DDG
probably do not work with Bing.

> _Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if
> Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they
> can and DDG does not help._

How would that work if GA is blocked and "!g" is used only rarely? Also, I use
Tor and DDG is the only search engine that doesn't annoy me with captchas
(Google's seem totally broken, often I need to solve multiple captchas for a
single query - I wish people would stop linking to Google searches...).

> _People saying that DDG 's search results are just as good are probably
> living in the US._

No, I live in Austria. I recall complaining about search results about the
time the "filter bubble" experiment by DDG ran, but the situation has greatly
improved since then.

------
cordite
This kind of stuff could easily be resolved by including a specific and
complete list in the first place.

Telling someone they aren't presentable isn't the same as telling a mostly
well dressed person that the host wants them to wear dark socks with their
dress shoes instead of white socks. (Hopefully this analogy is fitting.)

~~~
wavefunction
Fashion is a matter of taste, isn't it, and ultimately as void of real meaning
as the renderings of the "Opinion of Google"? I suppose perhaps your analogy
fits more well than you perhaps expected, but not in Google's favor.

------
gaadd33
I wonder if Google takes reports about Google pages not following their
polices seriously. Also I wonder if the same guidelines apply for major
software websites, I don't think download.com follows most of these
requirements.

~~~
x0x0
Submit your report to the european anti-trust commission.

------
ponytech
The funnier part: Google is listed as one of their customers on their home
page! [http://www.httpwatch.com](http://www.httpwatch.com)

------
mcintyre1994
I find the hypocrisy especially interesting given that a few years they
demoted Chrome for breaking a paid link rule. It certainly seems like this is
another blatant broken rule by the Chrome team - not that it's their fault
because they were probably never told about the rule either.

------
frade33
couple of years back, adwords suspended my account.

the only response i wrote back was, I have no intentions either, of paying my
money to a company that has little to no respect to its customers.

I got back instant response and got my account reinstated, but, still I didn't
agree, I asked him, I need written apology from the head manager, the support
person apologized for this, and said the head manager is traveling overseas.
So I accepted.

I never asked the reason why they did it in the first place. I was just
furious, you don't say fuck off to your customers, without first talking to
them.

------
brohoolio
Those Adwords support folks make like $10 an hour and are employed by third
parties.

I'm surprised you had a good resolution.

------
pasbesoin
A great example of Google "Do as I say, not as I do."

Re "How do I uninstall this?" Google Cloud Print appeared to be, at least on
Win XP a couple of years ago and when set up to share a non-Cloud-Print-native
printer, a one-way process. That borked non-Cloud printing (how the printer
used to work; functionality that was desired to continue) pretty thoroughly.

I like a lot of things about Google and their products. However, lack of
communication on topics such as these more than borders on arrogance.

P.S. OT, but: And _where_ is Lolipop for my 2013 Moto-X (then a Google
product) from Verizon. I bought it in good part because, unlike other Verizon
mobile products, timely updates were "promised" strongly as part of the
marketing and promotion. (And yeah, I need Verizon for specific reasons...)

Now? Bupkiss. With the better part of a year left on my two-year contract
(that I entered hesitantly but again, at least with this "promise" as some
comfort/reassurance).

Google is enormously selective in their "support" and not infrequently refuses
to go out of their way when it does not support the initiative du jour.

(E.g. but not only nor primarily, insisting the pressure stay on Verizon to
apply these updates.)

------
userbinator
I have a rather ominous feeling that the removal process was triggered by
automated scanning picking up certain keywords like "sniffer". In today's
environment of security paranoia, unfortunately it's not hard to imagine
something like that being interpreted the wrong way...

Also, I think "unwanted software" is a bit opaque; what they really mean is
software _Google_ doesn't want, not necessarily the user.

------
omnibrain
From the title I expected a piece about how this affected their business.
Graphs showing downloads before, during and after; etc.

------
mdekkers
Any kind of monoculture is simply a terrible thing.

