Google now provides a Search Status Dashboard, like Cloud and Workspace, to identify incidents and provide updates when its flagship product goes down.
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During incidents, this Status Dashboard will “communicate the status of Search.” A “systemic problem with a Search system affecting a large number of sites or Search users” is what Google calls a “widespread issue.” Here, you can look at historical events.
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.
Crawling, indexing, and serving are the three fundamental Search systems that are mentioned. “Within an hour, Google will post an incident on the dashboard, and consecutive updates to the incident within 12 hours,” the company promises.
This is not automated, and staff members located all over the world provide updates and reports.
Crawling: With automated programs known as crawlers, Google downloads text, images, and videos from pages it finds on the internet.
Indexing: The page’s text, images, and video files are analyzed by Google and stored in the Google index, a massive database.
Servicing search results: Google provides information that is relevant to a user’s query when they conduct a search.
Additionally, “mitigation possibilities when available” will be included in entries.
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.
When, according to Google, “our engineers have made changes that will end the impact on the system,” an incident is considered “resolved.” 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.
Lastly, the official source of updates now includes both the Search Central Twitter account and the Google Search Status Dashboard.