The PR people writing the article are rephrasing the words of the division lead who has aggregated the feedback from a bunch of project managers who are relaying what the data analysts in each team are interpreting from a host of metrics their engineers implemented.
It’s an onion of nonsense. At no point is any user involved.
Edit: or as another sibling comment aptly points out, they also might have just heard feedback… from annoyed employees.
To be fair, many Googlers are on Hackernews. There's been a lot of posts on HN recently complaining about how quotes was broken. Would not surprise me if a few Googler used the chatter to pull reports and quantify the impact leading to this fix.
I suspect you’re right. But knowing Google I have my doubts most Googlers have any real influence over this, unless they are in VERY specific positions in the company.
Maybe a decade ago, there were feedback pages. I recall when Google Maps changed its format. (I forget now what the change was, maybe scattering controls all over instead of having a sort of legend where all the controls sat.) There was a place where you could provide feedback, sort of like a Usenet page. Anyway, after the change there were thousands of posts, and after a few days tens of thousands of posts--every last one of them negative. (Well, there were one or two positives, but they were /s.) After a week someone from Google showed up and said they were listening. They eventually changed some very minor part of the format to look sort of more or less a little like it used to, while not budging on most of the changes they had made. At that point, people started posting alternative map sites.
I was involved in writing that post and, in particular, that sentence about feedback. I don't work for PR. I work for our search quality team, as a liaison between the team and the public to ... bring feedback we hear in a variety of places to help consider improvements. Hacker News was one of the places earlier this year where there was a lot of feedback about wanting to see how to make quote search work better. In responding to (see my profile) and exploring that feedback, it wasn't that quote searching was broken but that people couldn't readily understand we really did bring back documents with the quoted terms. So that's the feedback that went back to our team, and we looked at how to improve things which lead to the change we announced.
It’s an onion of nonsense. At no point is any user involved.
Edit: or as another sibling comment aptly points out, they also might have just heard feedback… from annoyed employees.