There was a tweet from Gary Illyes talk at PubCon where he possibly said that Google now monitors social media to find issues with Google search. Here is that tweet paraphrasing what Google's Gary Illyes said:
Now Google monitors social media to see if there are internal problems (like when the index was lost etc.)@methode #Pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 8, 2019
It just seems wrong - I mean, people like John Mueller, Danny Sullivan and others I believe partially do that as part of their job at Google.
Maybe Google made it more formal? Maybe Google set up specific tools to track social media that the company didn't have before?
It didn't seem to help Google spot that latest indexing bug before I spotted it?
Either way - it seems Google is saying it has stepped up how it tracks issues on social media. That isn't a bad thing...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Note: This story was pre-written before the Simchat Torah holiday. I am currently offline for the holiday and unable to respond to comments on this site, social, media or other platforms.
UPDATE: To be clear, I am not sure what is new here. Google has always tracked social media, even back in the "GoogleGuy" days. Googlers are always monitoring what is going on in social media, so I am not sure what is new here with what Gary is saying...
