As we move into 2023, Google is introducing a new tool for the public to understand the current status of the systems which impact their Search service - crawling, indexing, and serving. This is part of their commitment to transparency in the rare cases where system disruptions do occur. To date, they have used their Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) and Google Search Central Twitter account to provide this information.
Google has now launched a new Google Search Status Dashboard at https://status.search.google.com/ in order to provide up-to-date information about major incidents that may affect their services going forward. The dashboard has been developed over the past couple years with input from the SREs and aims to make reporting issues quick, accurate, and easy for users.
Google Search Status Dashboard provides information on any widespread issues occurring in the last 7 days, with details and the current status of the incident. A widespread issue is one that affects a large number of sites or Search users and is typically very visible externally. The dashboard has several features such as an RSS feed to subscribe to and a view of historical data. Google aims to post an incident on the dashboard within an hour after confirming a widespread issue with SREs and updates within 12 hours. The time of the incident is generally when they managed to confirm it. Those interested in using this service can find out more information at Search system, SREs' monitoring and alerting mechanisms ,RSS feed and view of historical data
Google provides more than just the traditional status update for its Search Status dashboard. In addition, Google provides solutions to any issues that may be experienced. For example, if the nameserver handling domain name resolution is refusing Googlebot’s connection requests, Google engineers may provide an update to change nameservers as a way to mitigate the issue sites are experiencing. Furthermore, an incident is considered resolved when changes have been made that end the impact on the system. However, sites may still experience effects until they are reprocessed, depending on the type of incident.
For more information about the Search Status dashboard, please visit this dedicated page on Google Search Central. Additionally, feedback about this dashboard can be left by tweeting @googlesearchc here.
Gary Illyes, a member of the Search Team at Google, recently provided an update on the algorithm changes the company has made in order to better provide users with quality results. He discussed how these changes have been implemented in a way that allows Google to not just evaluate websites based on their content, but also take into account other signals that may indicate the quality of a website. He also mentioned some algorithmic improvements such as improved language understanding, new search features for images and videos, and updates to how local ranking works. Lastly, he touched on ways Google is helping protect against malicious websites and improving overall user experience when it comes to searching online. With these updates and more coming in the future, users can rest assured that they are getting quality search results from Google.