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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

There is a "this query didn't work right" button on search - it's the "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of a result page, which links to:

http://www.google.com/quality_form?q=foo

The problem is that it gets polluted by lots of people who have no clue that Google is not the Internet, or (for that matter) their neighborhood handyman that they found through Google and who did an awesome job repairing their windows. A lot of people don't make a distinction between "I found what I was looking for" and "What I was looking for worked out for me", which makes a lot of the feedback a little less than useful.

This thread is as good a place as any - I'm guessing that the URL will get passed around, the appropriate teams will read it and adjust their algorithms, and if DuckDuckGo gets to improve their algorithms too, great - it's one more good search engine that people can use.

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Why do people insist on blaming users when users use things in the "wrong" way? If you give a general feedback button to a user, they will give you back general feedback of all kinds - it's not that hard to understand, really. If you want to get feedback specific to the quality of the search results, then provide another button that says "Tell us if the results you got are not useful / just spam". Be clear about what exactly the button does, and you'll get meaningful reports from the users. Note that I said another button - you always need a general feedback button for people wanting to report something else, that's how you get general and specific feedback.

Also, google is one of the worst companies, if not the worst company, at dealing with user feedback. You can't just expect people to give you feedback but never return the favor in any way. People have the feeling that giving feedback to google is like throwing things into a black hole - like talking to a machine - if you know no one will answer you and you will never know if anyone even read your feedback, not even a little thank you note or a clue that the feedback was useful, there isn't much incentive to give feedback, now is there?

Google Maps (a different beast, of course) handles feedback exceptionally well. You're first thanked and promised a response, then a couple of days later you usually get a "you were right, we'll fix that and let you know when it's fixed", and then within a few months another "we fixed it, here's a link to what you reported (shown on Google Maps), please let us know if we still didn't get it right".

As a result, I enjoy reporting issues to Google Maps, because I know they will be addressed. Maps are dealing with a lot more tangible and unchanging dataset than Search, though.

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