You Know What Google Needs? A 900 Number

[carguy84]

After having some sort of DNS issue with the googlebot this past week, and losing our homepage out of the index, it made me long to have the ability to get someone on the phone. I realize with the grand reach of Google and the Internet, maybe that isn't practical without insanely long hold queues.

But what about a pay per incident? $50.00 to talk to a live human being, or a service subscription fee for priority support that you pay $xx/month for and have a Webmaster Account Manager of some sort to handle emails and phone calls.

We lost about 15% of our traffic over a 3 day period and had to handle support calls relating to it, so the price of the pay per incident or the price of the subscription fee would have been nominal for us to just get the confirmation that yes, it was on their end and no, there's nothing you can do about it.

We ended up posting in their Groups section and we were (very nicely) answered by a Google employee about 24 hours later, but it was a 24 hours I slept very little and worried very a lot.

An hour into realizing something was wrong, it would have been great to be able to call Google, even if it required a financial transaction. Heck, I'd probably have bought a bulk of pay per incident vouchers if possible (you know, if they were Costco discounted for buying 10 at a time...).

Anyway, my mini rant/idea. All is back to normal with our site, but I'm curious if other people would pay as well.

Chip-

[HuskyPup]

but I'm curious if other people would pay as well.

Personally no since, fingers crossed, I've never had this sort of problem however for those large traffic sites I could certainly see the benefit of it.

I suppose it falls into the category of software support lines, directory enquiries and many of those call centre things, it's very rare I have used any of them BUT there are those who do...seemingly all the time!

[signor_john]

Why would Google want to encourage threads on the topic of "My site has disappeared from the Google Search index, so Google must be trying to generate revenue for its 900 number"? :-)

[HuskyPup]

Nice one s_j...and well done on being the first to ask that question :-)

[LifeinAsia]

Aw, but that would dry up all the "My AdSense account has been banned!" threads.

[signor_john]

Aw, but that would dry up all the "My AdSense account has been banned!" threads.

On the other hand, we might see some threads about whether Google penalizes Webmasters who block Caller ID. :-)

[carguy84]

Why would Google want to encourage threads on the topic of "My site has disappeared from the Google Search index, so Google must be trying to generate revenue for its 900 number"? :-)

ha yes, perhaps Reynolds stock price would increase, but I'd rather laugh at people who would claim such a thing and get immediate answers to questions, than worry about the tinfoil hat people and what they think.

If the 900 number was the ONLY way to get in contact with Google, sure, conspiracy theorists, unite. But they do have other, slower methods available.

[internetheaven]

As a part-time clairvoyant ... I predict, that lawsuits would ensue as people pay $50 trying to get Google to tell them why they don't rank.

When 1,000,000 people are told "sorry, we can't provide that information" the $50,000,000+ lawsuit would tempt any lawyer to try their luck.