Today's question comes from Canada,
and it's a fun question.
Cale McNulty asks, "Google's approach to customer service,
and why it uses algorithms instead of people?"
OK, So customer service, or user support, is a really
interesting problem.
Because normally, if you're a company, you're only
supporting the people who buy your product.
So even if you're a hugely successful company, you have a
relatively small group of people
that you have to support.
With Google, we're literally supporting anybody on the web
who wants to use our free web service.
And so there's, at last estimate, something like 2
billion people on the web.
A lot of them use Google.
So I think Dewitt Clinton had done a little bit of an
analysis, where he said if you have a billion people, say,
each person only has a problem once every three years.
And then that person has a problem that can be solved in,
say, take 10 minutes.
And he worked out the math.
And it showed something like we would need over 20,000
people to handle customer support or user support just
for those instances.
So one 10-minute instance every three years for a
billion-plus people.
And if it's 2 billion people, then you need 40,000 support
people, right?
So no matter how you slice and dice the numbers, it's really,
really tricky to support the sheer number of people who
have questions about how Google works, or the number of
webmasters, you know, there's over 200 million domains on
the web, so the ability to answer those questions.
So first and foremost, we try to look for things that scale.
So answering questions one-on-one on Twitter can work
really well, but then you're just talking to one person.
Same thing with email.
If you're only talking to one person privately on email,
you're not solving a bunch of other people's problems.
So we've looked around at how to solve support, and it's
been an ongoing evolution.
So, for example, GoogleGuy hosted starting back in 2001
on webmaster forums. And that was a pretty good solution,
because then lots of people could read the answers there.
AdWordsAdvisor showed up just a little while later and has
answered literally thousands of questions.
Soon afterwards, a couple years later, we've rolled out
forums. So the ability where lots of different people can
show up and help each other with questions and answers,
and that scales relatively well.
So there's a bunch different things that we think about.
And we continue to try different experiments.
Things like blogging, things like webmaster chats.
These webmaster videos that can sometimes get tens of
thousands of views, so that's a pretty
scalable support mechanism.
We've also tried things like AdWords support.
So now you have telephone support if you use AdWords,
where you can call up.
And you might disagree if somebody says, oh, we don't
think you should be using those keywords, and we're not
going to allow you.
But you can actually talk to a person.
Anybody who's using AdWords can call up
and get phone support.
So we're continuing to try to iterate.
It's a really hard problem.
I'm not sure everyone realizes when you're talking about
internet scale numbers, just how many people have
questions, or want to know how Google works, or want to know
about their website.
And so it is really tricky to be able to offer that sort of
support scalably.
Google's thinking about how to do it in all kinds of
different ways all the time.
So if you have suggestions, we're happy to hear it.
But hopefully, that makes clear that it's not just like
we don't want to do it.
It's just it's a hard problem.
We're trying to figure out how to do it well.
And algorithms are a good way to do that.
So Google's Webmaster Tools are a self-service mechanism
where you can find your own errors, find your own links,
identify issues where your site might be slow.
And that's really nice, because if you don't have to
talk to a person to remove a URL, for example, if it's a
self-service system, then that's much more scalable.
So if you look at things through that lens, you can see
a lot of the different innovations that we offer.
Everything from rel canonical to preferred domains with www
versus non-www, a lot of that we try to aim to be
self-service, so that we're not on the critical path, so
that you don't need to talk to us to solve your problems.
Sometimes it works really well.
Sometimes we don't do as well as we'd like to do.
But we're always trying to think about how to do better.
So thanks for asking the question.