'We didn't set out to build a market research tool' Brian Tarran talks to Google Consumer Surveys' (GCS) product manager Paul McDonald and head of business development Monica Plaza about the origins of GCS and where they plan to take it next. Research : How did Google arrive at the idea of developing a survey product? Paul McDonald: We were trying to figure out a way to keep premium content online and free for web users. We saw paywalls going up at places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and we decided that we didn't really like that experience, so we thought about ways people could pay for content without actually having to pull out their credit cards. The original idea was that we could get them to complete a small task, something that humans are good at doing but computers aren't, like labelling images for our image search results or picking the best set of search results for a given search query. So what we did was a small trial of this on the Huffington Post for about a month in July 2010. Half were tasks, the other half were market research questions, so we could see what the reaction was to the ideas, what the completion rates were like - that sort of thing. "We didn't set out to build the best market research tool; we tried to build the best monetisation option" It turned out that the tasks were much harder for users