Google has launched a new status dashboard, this dashboard is for Google Search at status.search.google.com.
Google Search status dashboard. The Google Search status dashboard will show you if there is an outage or issue with Google Search. Specifically, Google will confirm if there is an issue with crawling, indexing, or serving in Google Search.
Google wrote, “as we head into 2023, we want to introduce another tool for the public to understand the most current status of systems which impact Search—crawling, indexing, and serving.”
Issues are rare. Google said, “while system disruptions are extremely rare, we want to be transparent when they do happen.” And yes, we have reported many issues over the years with Google Search around indexing, crawling, and serving. But now Google has a way to report it within its Google Status Dashboard system as it does for Google Ads and many other products.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this dashboard:
How it works. Google explained, “This dashboard reports widespread issues occurring in the last 7 days, with some details and the current status of the incident. A widespread issue means there’s a systemic problem with a Search system affecting a large number of sites or Search users. Typically these kinds of issues are very visible externally, and internally the SREs’ monitoring and alerting mechanisms are working behind the scenes to flag the issues.”
“Once we confirm with SREs that there’s an ongoing, widespread issue in Search, we aim to post an incident on the dashboard within an hour, and consecutive updates to the incident within 12 hours. Unlike with a traditional automated dashboard, our global staff reports these updates. The start time of the incident is generally when we managed to confirm the issue,” Google added.
Why we care. We sometimes, rarely, see issues with Google Search around indexing, crawling, and serving but we have to reach out to Google to confirm the issue. Now, Google will post those confirmations on the dashboard, as it does for many of its other products and services.
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Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.