Update: Seems broken again around 11am EDT.
It is rare to see Google bug out, not work, when you try to use it. But yesterday starting around 3pm EDT through this morning at 3am EDT Google could not give you search results for the query [compare the market]. It is not clear why it was broken, but it was for about 12 hours - which is really unheard of.
I covered it last night at Search Engine Land but it is so unusual, I want to share it with you here. We've probably all seen the error once or twice in our life, but typically a refresh would remove the error in Google. But in this case, a refresh did not fix it.
Instead you got this:
Why? I have no idea. I suspect something, maybe a feature or some weird snippet, made Google chock on the result and fail. There was a delay, Google was trying to return results but then it failed.
At first, Google didn't realize it was an issue:
Only scrapers would see that status code. o_O pic.twitter.com/BP02shrfNh
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 13, 2018
Or didn't take it seriously:
Well, that's awkward. Thanks!
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 13, 2018
But Danny Sullivan of Google did say he reported it:
It's not. It's a server error -- just like it says. Server errors sometimes happen. We're investigating.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 13, 2018
Adding that this isn't a ranking issue:
It's not going to be a ranking issue for you or anything like that. It's also probably something hitting other queries that just haven't been noticed. We hope to get it solved soon.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 13, 2018
Although when the results came back, this guy said he lost his rankings:
It's still being debugged so give it some more time. If you're the SEO, we'll do follow up through Search Console if needed.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 14, 2018
Wonder what that is about?
Any guesses?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
