[quietpain]

  Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email?

Google's strategy has always been to focus on the things that scale. Having a human answer a phone or a mail doesn't scale, so no customer service for the users.

I think this is also the reason why these ads get through: to detect them they rely for a large part on crowd-sourcing: that "report a problem" link is IMHO one of their main mechanisms to deal with filtering out the bad ones. If more get through then it might indicate that the scale is tipping to the point that crowd-sourcing relies on too few people who go through the effort.

[ravenstine]

In that case, few things will actually scale for The Google except scaling itself. The only reason that The Google even has things like Gmail is they consider it a loss leader, and the only reason quirky things like Google Books still exists is because there is just enough engineers who care at that company that said projects get (barely) maintained. Otherwise, it's all about growth and scaling things, and because of the level of decoupling between the customer and the business model from direct-transactional perspective, there is little to no need to treat the customer as if they exist at all. The Google certainly have a very interesting business model, indeed.

[lolc]

I never report anything to Google. They don't give back.

When I try to report mail spam from their network they want me to fill out a form instead of reading the abuse mail they got.

[DistractionRect]

AFAIK, they do man a public relations address. It's for managing news outlets, not customer support.

[avipars]

For Google one and enterprise customers, I do believe there is a support line where you speak to an actual human