Google Introduce Search Status Dashboard Update

1. Google Introduce Search Status Dashboard Update on 14th December 2022
2. How Google communicate incidents and updates
3. Google Confirm No Plans for Translations
4. Why Google is Publishing a Search Status Dashboard

While the holiday season is around the corner, Google has introduced another tool: a new status dashboard accessible at https://status.search.google.com/ that will report the systems current status, which impacts all three essential components of Search, i.e. Crawling, Indexing and Serving. It will inform the general public about Google search system disruptions as and when they happen. Earlier the same information was made available to the public through the Google Search Central Twitter account.

How it looks like: Here is screenshot:

The current new search status board only cover three kinds of outages to search:

1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Searching

Google was constantly trying to provide information about significant incidents in an accessible and valuable way by engaging with their Site Reliability Engineers (SRE). By doing this, Google has introduced a new search status dashboard that reports tasks more quickly, accurately, and efficiently. It is not a traditional automated dashboard and reporting of the updates will be done by Google global staff.

How Google communicate incidents and updates

Once any outage issue is confirmed, it will be available in an hour on a new status dashboard. All updates related to an outage issue will be available within 12 hours.

Though outages in the Search system are rare, Google wants to report them in a particular way to maintain transparency.

This tool is important because, in the past, if there was a problem with the Google search, one had to reach out to Google to confirm that. But now Google will post all the outage issues on the search dashboard.

Google Confirm No Plans for Translations

After this new search dashboard was released, Google released a podcast that unfolds more information about the new search status dashboard and the types of incidents it will report. And currently, there are no plans from Google to translate updates to other languages.

The podcast revealed that Google promised to launch a search dashboard in 2019 when it suffered a major outage in the same year.

Why Google is Publishing a Search Status Dashboard

Gay Illyes explained:

“Well, one of the promise that we did in 2019, so… we said that we would have a more organized and more useful communication channel for Search incidents.

So that was one of the inspiration for the dashboard."

Google monitors and maps its three search-related services to a dashboard and incidents that would go into the related bucket.

1. The crawling bucket will contain Googlebot crawling issues, E.g. if Googlebot cannot crawl even a single website on the internet.
2. The indexing bucket will contain indexing-related issues, E.g. if most of the websites have a canonicalization problem, then it will appear in this bucket.
3. Service bucket will have an entry in it if a large number of users are not able to open up google.com

The podcast also unfolded a key piece of information: Google is looking at the performance of this newly released tool and might add other types of incidents as well.

This podcast also noted that Google is not planning to support the translation of the new status page.

As per the active community of Googlers, the reason for not providing support for the translation is due to the CMS's complexity. And many believe that Google translate is available for the ones that need to read English.

John Mueller started off this part of the conversation:

“John Mueller:

Are there plans for translations or is that already happening?

Gary Illyes: No.

Like in the current setup, it’s practically not possible to have translations, and they are not even thinking about it.

Mostly because they, as in the developers of the dashboard, because the dashboard is kind of like a CMS(Content Management Systems) that we share with other Google products or Alphabet products."

One can receive updates through the RSS feed, which is located at https://status.search.google.com/en/feed.atom

This newly released Google search dashboard comes in handy when an assessment has to be made about whether the drop in ranking for a particular website happened due to the algorithm itself or the outage at Google search.

The podcast mentioned above is available on Youtube.