Google Search gets Status Dashboard to provide updates during outages

Abner Li | Dec 14 2022 - 12:31 am PT

Like Cloud and Workspace, Google now offers a Search Status Dashboard to identify incidents and provide updates when its flagship product goes down.

This Status Dashboard will “communicate the status of Search,” especially during incidents. Google defines a “widespread issue” as a “systemic problem with a Search system affecting a large number of sites or Search users.” You’ll be able to view historical incidents here.

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.

The three core Search systems listed are Crawling, Indexing, and Serving. Google will “post an incident on the dashboard within an hour, and consecutive updates to the incident within 12 hours.” This is not automated, with reports and updates coming from staff located around the world.

Crawling: Google downloads text, images, and videos from pages it found on the internet with automated programs called crawlers.
Indexing: Google analyzes the text, images, and video files on the page, and stores the information in the Google index, which is a large database.
Serving search results: When a user searches on Google, Google returns information that’s relevant to the user’s query.

Entries will also include “mitigation possibilities when available.”

For example, in the hypothetical scenario that the nameserver handling domain name resolution for millions of sites refuses Googlebot’s connection requests, we may post an update saying that changing nameservers may mitigate the issue sites are experiencing.

Google says an incident is considered “resolved when our engineers have made changes that will end the impact on the system.” However:

While this means that the system itself is now healthy, sites may experience effects for some time until they’re reprocessed, depending on the type of incident.

The Google Search Status Dashboard joins the Search Central Twitter account as an official source of updates.