from Hacker News

Google Consumer Survey

by iag on 10/8/12, 3:50 AM with 45 comments

• by RobAley on 10/8/12, 9:21 AM

  Don't use this if you are going to spend money based on the outcome (or do anything else important with it).

  People do not have a vested interest in completing the questions honestly or on the outcome. Their motivation is to get to the premium content, and although there will be some that are honest, most people are trying to get "free" content and have the most motivation towards not giving value (money or answers that betray their privacy/thoughts) back.

  My day job is primarily based on analysing survey results, and I can tell you that the only way to get decent usable results from "paying" people is to make sure that they have a vested interest in the results of the survey and that the payment is a (nice) side-effect of completing the survey and not the goal.

  Edit: Of course, this type of survey can be useful if you need to "validate" something that otherwise you can't (i.e. to falsify results). Simply choose multiple choice questions and stack the answers in the right order (people usually click in certain pattern when doing it at "random"). Keep repeating or extending your survey until you have the right ratio of participants in favour of your preposition, then call it a day and publish!

• by franze on 10/8/12, 8:15 AM

  the thing is with tools nobody knows about is, that google regularly kills them. i.e.: http://trends.google.com/websites?q= google trends for websites

  this was the unbelievable useful tool to get competitive data (traffic, queries) about other websites. it was not perfect, the data was sometimes months late. but it was good enough to compare websites with each other.

  now it's gone. probably it didn't fit into google strategy. probably someone at google decided that "we are not in the business of providing competitive intelligence data of websites" (i guess that, as the google adplanner was stripped of lots of website data in the same timeframe )

  the same thing with the product mentioned above. it will be killed. maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but sure as hell sometime.

• by mansoor-s on 10/8/12, 7:20 AM

  I've seen these kinds of things in the past. I can say first hand that I for one do not read the questions... type gibberish in text fields and select random choices in multiple choice answers. I am sure others will do the same.

  I don't see how this can work. The only time I see it some-what-working is while gathering a massive (really massive) amount of submissions for a decision involving only two options. Maybe then... but even then it wouldn't be possible to determine the actual percentage of users suggesting one or the other option.

• by mtrimpe on 10/8/12, 8:37 AM

  You can email Paul McDonald to get a free voucher to try this out (see http://www.quora.com/Google/What-is-it-like-to-use-Google-Co...)

  I used it to ask how much people were willing to pay to collect video customer reviews and a lot of the responses were 11111111, 1000000 or 12345 dollars per month though.

• by brennenHN on 10/8/12, 6:20 AM

  I used this once and was really happy with the results. I think there's a little bit of an opportunity bias which good statisticians would have issues with, but for some useful imperfect numbers I think it's a good solution.

  Also, this is a pretty new tool.

• by interg12 on 10/8/12, 6:22 AM

  This type of market research was previously only accessible to companies that could drop 10k or more on these surveys. This tool will help entrepreneurs validate ideas they were unable to test because it was cost prohibitive.

• by waterlesscloud on 10/8/12, 6:29 AM

  So for $110 I could run my own presidential election poll?

  Hmmmmm.

  No, wait. Targeting is 50 cents a person, not 10. So it would be about $550. Still, though.

• by sami36 on 10/8/12, 5:49 AM

  This is brand new, I saw it previewed on JLG Monday Note blog. The consumers are going to be incentivized to take them as a form of micropayment for access to articles behind a paywall...win-win for everybody I guess.

• by ckelly on 10/8/12, 7:09 PM

  Glad to see the interest in this new form of market research. YC S12 company Survata.com offers a similar service. We can run multiple questions at a time, so researchers enjoy the ability to cross-tab responses (an important ability you lose when you run only 1 question surveys on other services). We encourage you to check us out at Survata.com (we give all first time users a $10 coupon) and we welcome any feedback.

• by Axsuul on 10/8/12, 7:17 AM

  Although this idea isn't new, I'm glad Google is getting into this space in order to make it more competitive and cheaper to perform these types of surveys.

• by arpit on 10/8/12, 1:41 PM

  This is clearly not my domain, so I am sure I am missing something, but how is this different from creating, say, a Wufoo form to prompt users to enter information that you need? (WuFoo seems to be $0.05 per entry)

• by auston on 10/8/12, 7:50 AM

  The term for this is "content-locking". The opposite side of this relationship (for publishers): http://www.blamads.com/

  disclaimer: friend owns that site

• by laacz on 10/8/12, 5:55 AM

  Won't this lead to pay-walls adopting this and eventually creation of pay-per-view non-news sites? If so, people will blindly click thgough and quality of data won't match expectations.

• by netmau5 on 10/8/12, 3:41 PM

  Well the paywall thing is a huge deal-killer for me although I love the a response dashboard system they've built. For those of you conducting surveys, what are some good alternatives?

• by tsieling on 10/8/12, 2:50 PM

  Now you, too, can test 41 shades of blue.