The best support (the only real support) I’ve ever gotten for Google products were

(a) partnersupport-de@youtube.com (support for youtube partners, monetized, back in the days, German),

(b) This very website. Start an angry thread, get it to the front page – or post a comment on a frontpage thread about a dev topic – and suddenly some Google dev ends up fixing it, and in the same moment, your comment on here disappears.

Support methods I have also tried:

(c) Buying Google Apps for Business (the 30 day free month), then calling their support, after the support call was successful, cancelling it again (doesn’t work, Google doesn’t answer Google Apps for Business calls, someone takes your call, you say hi, in the same second they hang up on you)

Support methods I have not tried yet, but plan to, in case the previous ones don’t work anymore:

(d) Just arriving in person at their nearest Google office, getting entrance somehow, and then directly providing my complaints to the next manager (at risk of getting sued for entering their office illegally)

I received some excellent support from the GCS (Google Cloud Storage) team while I was working on my last project. There was only an email address listed in the API docs. I didn't have high hopes when I first contacted them with an issue, but I got a response in less than 24 hours, and a similarly quick response to my following response. That first problem was due to my own misunderstanding of the API, which the person in question patiently helped me better understand.

The last time I was in contact with them was a few months ago. I got another reasonably-timed response, and this was an issue on their end (something to do with an occasionally missed automated notification when files were uploaded). It took a couple weeks or so to fix the problem, but they contacted me after each upgrade (rather than waiting for me to contact them) to follow-up and see if my issue had been resolved. After a couple rounds, it was fixed.

I'm not sure I've ever received personal support from Google prior to that, but in my experience, the GCS support team was/is absolutely top notch.

> Which consumer Google product has a kind of support different than a volunteer forum?

The one I've dealt with recently is Google Express.

I spoke to someone at Google on the phone about a problem I had with Google Music. There is a "request callback" link in the help/support section. I've also asked questions on the phone regarding purchasing videos from their digital store- specifically, what quality playback would be supported on my Chromebook model. It didn't take long from question asked -> question answered in either case.