Dear Google,
I have been a satisfied customer of your services for many years. However, for a few months now I am feeling more and more dissatisfied with the level of your service. Please let me explain, using two examples.
1. The Quality of Search Results
I get the feeling that despite your constant tuning of your search algorithms, the quality of search results is not really increasing. To give you an example, it was impossible for me to find some of my friend's web sites using your search engine. Interestingly, your competitors do not seem to suffer from that problem. Type my friends name into the search field and their websites are listed on first position. Unfortunately, the same is also happening with my homepage. So, if someone searches for my name, the first result you return is some page from a conference website containing my bio, followed by lots of really irrelevant pages. My homepage, despite having my last name in the domain name and my full name in almost every page title, comes on position 12.
2. AdWords
I have been using your AdWords service for some time now to drive some traffic to my company's homepage. Now, what's happening here is that every time I visit one of my campaign pages, lots of keywords are marked as inactive, with the note to increase the bid by some unreasonable amount to reactivate them. The cost I pay for the ads has very much tripled since I started using your service, without giving me back any more value. Bob Cringely's recent columns indicate that others are making the same experience.
Now, I am just one of many small customers of yours, and you probably don't care losing my business or that of other small customers. Nevertheless, your competition is not asleep, and, as the saying goes, other mothers have cute daughters, too. So, maybe you should take some time to sit back and think about your core values, that you display so proudly on your website.
Yours Sincerely,
G.
Posted by guenter at June 8, 2006 09:11 AM