It's always nice to see Matt Cutts and JohnMu
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/posts-by-Matt+Cutts.html
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/posts-by-JohnMu.html
on here (did i miss anyone?), but i'm wondering how many other Googlers are lurking on Blogoscoped. All secretly lurking Googlers, give a shout on this thread!

Are any present Googlers simply here for themselves, or is it part of their job?

If Google has people monitoring blogoscoped and other popular Google blogs, what kinds of things are looked for, and how are the opinions expressed here weighed against the mass of messages sent through generic feedback forms for different google products and other forms of contact?

Is every post seen by Google? If so, and not to open up a can of worms, is the feedback that us forum regulars post here getting seen by the right people and passed on? I'm sure Google is aware that customer support is hard on such a large scale and theirs isn't too great (for the many issues that can't be solved by other users in the help forums) so i wonder where they get their most valuable feedback.

Shameless blogspam: I tried tackling the customer support issue here-- http://blog.thesilentnumber.me/2009/04/google-customer-support-issues.html

I remember Vanessa Fox used to post here, I'm sure there were a few others too...

Hi DPic

Googlers are people too :-) – they tend to surf around, they have their favorite sites where they regularly hit F5 to see what's new, they subscribe to feeds and set up Google Alerts. When one of those places mentions something about a Google product or service, you can be pretty certain that someone will pass it on internally. In most cases, you're not going to see a Googler jump in and post "hey, we're going to fix this next week" – working out the best answer (can we confirm a bug? what's the possible timeline? are there legal issues? should I be speaking on behalf of Google for a product I don't work on? etc) sometimes takes a bit of time that we'd rather invest in just getting it done :-).

That said, we can't possibly analyze every post here, in our forums and in all related forums. We can try to aggregate that information using smart algorithms, but in the end, if something important comes up, we often rely on the fact that we have a ton of people using our products and services and if it's affecting a lot of people, we're going to run accross a mention in our forums or someone is going to notice and pass it on to the teams involved. As mentioned above, we can't reply to every post in the forum – but we do read most of them, so even if you don't see a direct reply, there's always a good chance that it will reach someone on our side.

When something goes down or otherwise breaks in a bad way, we're also likely to know about that from our automated monitoring. By the time people post about it, we usually already have engineers working on it. They're amazingly fast, it's extremely rare that Googlers can inform a team of an outage before they know about it. I'm always in awe of these people and their fast reaction times.

As to where we get our best feedback? That's definitely from our users – here, there, internally, everywhere :-).

John

/likes John's reply

John's reply makes it very clear that how seriously they take Blogoscoped. Reason being this is one of the most serious and well managed Google related blog/forum.

As far as I know from many of my friends in Google, they seriously monitor this forum along with Ionut's website and few other for reactions and reviews.

Hats off to Philipp for bring blogoscoped to this level.

And several members of this forum became Googlers too... hi Caleb, hi Reto... :)

Does that mean there's also a higher chance of being hired if you're a regular here? I'd love a job, Google! xD

Weren't Roger Browne and John Mu Posters here before they got hired too?

James: I think you mean Reto, LOL.

I was a Google Answers Researcher, but that was a contract position, not employment.

Haha, yes indeed, Reto, sorry about that.

Wow, the Google observes us. Nifty. I feel like I should make funny faces at them, like a silly child in front of a security camera.

Googlers have received information about vulnerabilities in Google applications via this forum several times too.

Hi Guys!

Like John says, we're still regular folk, and the Blogoscoped community is one I've always enjoyed being a part of.

Most Googlers are keen consumers of tech news so it's not surprising that there's a bunch of us that lurk on boards like these.

The type of conversations that tend to come up on Blogoscoped makes it hard for Googlers to respond a lot of the time. My favourite threads were always the ones debating Google's ethics and speculating on future product release, so you can see why I haven't been contributing as much lately!