I had a big issue with AdWords earlier this month. Google made it all but impossible for me to reach anyone about it. Earlier this year, I had an issue with my bank denying an AdWords bill (to protect me against possible fraud). It took one minute on the phone to resolve.

You make a hundred times what my bank does off me. Why is human contact only possible if we speak the secret password into the telephone disguised as a shoe which is stored in the unused broom closet marked Beware of Leopard.

As I mentioned in my anti-Google Checkout article on Slash7 (which you commented on), not only has Google attempted to steal money from me by closing my Checkout account, but my husband lost over $2,000 of Adsense money when his account was arbitrarily closed.

He's the author of Scriptaculous - and the ads were on the Scriptaculous site - a totally innocent open source contributor.

So, support money was effectively stolen from a popular open source project.

Of course he appealed.

And he never heard back.

The commenter above is right: One-off help for those who are able to make a lot of noise, and hurt Google's image, is not enough. It got me my Checkout account back, and it will probably get the OP's Adsense account back.

But my husband never made a public fuss, and so of course all his attempts to reach out to Google were completely ignored.

Until there's a system in place other than "be famous and make noise," nobody should trust Google with their money, in any way.

Anyone who's interested in more back story (and my recommendations for improving the Google experience), these are the two articles I wrote:

http://slash7.com/articles/2009/3/26/google-is-evil-worse-th...

http://slash7.com/articles/2009/3/28/google-checkout-still-u...

Not saying it is easy or free to get there, but the same arguments can mostly be said for Microsoft and they seem to be doing pretty OK.

I've had excellent support from them, 24/7, on the phone, including weekends, where I've been assigned one person and one person only to fix some critical issues which had to be dealt with before monday 7am.

I have nothing but praise for the Microsoft support team. However just trying to find non-automated support for my google-services seems impossible.

I do realize Microsoft and google has different business models and don't mean to come off hostile, but Google upping their customer-service standards a little bit wouldn't hurt.

Come back when you have some data on either the number of people leaving or the impact of their absence.

It contains exactly one piece of "useful" information, the link to the disabled account FAQ. The rest is just simply terrible. It starts with a very serious accusation, intoning "significant risk" and "financial damage", but Google wasn't "compelled" or "forced" to act, it "decided" to, implying not that some mandatory threshold was reached but that someone sat down and worked it out and reluctantly agreed that this was the way to go, or worse, that sometimes similar situations might go the other way.

Immediately after accusing the person of being an evil bastard, it turns on the smarmy fake politeness. "Please understand" that we think you're an evil bastard. "Thank you" for understanding that we think you're an evil bastard. And thanks for "cooperating", even though you actually have no choice in the matter at all. If you have any questions, kindly fuck off and don't use the same method of communication we just used to reach you, here's a link to more standardized dehumanizing copy.

It reads like Google is breaking up with you while checking its phone, acting like you've done something horrible enough to merit no discussion on the matter, trying to act nice enough so you don't think it's a bitch, but making it clear it doesn't give a shit and really never did.

Here's the short version of my recent experience:

Half of my business comes from AdWords and I'm pretty happy with it. Actually, you could go substantially farther than that: I'm literally a case study for it, recommend it any chance I get, and despite what I'm about to tell you continue to recommend it.

One day, for no reason I could be certain of, AdWords just stopped serving my ads. Google's automated diagnostic said that you had no credit card on file for my account. That was contrary to reality, as you had already successfully billed me for $300 that week and about $12k total.

I respect that you would rather I use the self-help automated diagnostic, FAQ, and whatnot. But either the diagnostic was broken or your data was, and the FAQ didn't address "What to do if our diagnostic tells you untrue things". So I tried to contact support.

After digging through about 5 separate redirects to get to "contact an AdWords representative", I wrote up a detailed bug report (or as detailed as the 512 character limit would accept) and sent it in. As for what I got back, you can read the above blog post, but it was non-responsive and appears to be computer generated for me.

In the wake of the above blog post and further attempts to use the "scalable communication methods", I was contacted by an AdWords representative. This is now several days after I had first contacted Google. She successfully summarized my issue (which proves that she was not a computer -- an oddly comforting notion to me by this point) and said she would escalate it to a specialist to investigate.

That was a month ago. I still haven't heard back.

On the plus side, the symptom which was of most immediate concern to me (my sales dropping by half because my AdWords ads were not showing) recovered before I missed my entire busy season, and things are more or less normal for me now.

From personal experience, finding an Apple employee who can even find out what is going on with an iPhone app waiting for review for months can be difficult if not impossible without connections inside the company. However, if you have a development-related question or a bug report you want looked at, there's plenty of Apple employees on Twitter that would be happy to answer such as Chris Espinosa (a manager on the Xcode team and Apple employee #8, @cdespinosa) and Michael Jurewitz (developer tools evangelist, @jurewitz).

1. This is not a problem with Google's Customer Service, it is a problem with their vendor relations. When Google publishes ads on your site, you are selling that space to them. Google is your customer and isn't obligated to tell you a damn thing except that they don't want to buy from you anymore.

2. There is a market opportunity here for an ad network that is willing to find good sites dropped from Google Adsense by erroneous algorithms. And that can appeal to the news herd (all the traffic driven by reddit, hn, slashot, digg, etc.) with either brand advertising or targeted ads designed to appeal to surfers from those sources.

The thing is, from a strictly mathematical point of view Google may be perfectly correct, the 100 visitors a day coming to the site while looking for robotics news may have been more valuable to their advertisers than 10,000 stimulus hungry nerds that don't buy shit. And while it's hard on the site in question Google is playing for the percentages, not sheer volume.