I always wondered why Google had status dashboards for hundreds of other products across Gmail, Drive, Google Ads, etc., but not for Google Search - its most important product/service. But that all changed today when Google launched its Google Search Status Dashboard report.
Today, Google launched the Google Search Status Dashboard report at status.search.google.com. This report will give you official confirmation from Google when there is an issue or outage with crawling, indexing or serving with the Google Search service.
Here is a screenshot of this:
Google said "As we head into 2023, we want to introduce another tool for the public to understand the most current status of systems which impact Search—crawling, indexing, and serving. While system disruptions are extremely rare, we want to be transparent when they do happen. In the past, we've worked with our Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) to externalize these disruptions on our Google Search Central Twitter account. Today, we're introducing the Google Search Status Dashboard to communicate the status of Search going forward."
This dashboard reports widespread issues occurring in the last seven days, with some details and the current status of the incident. A widespread issue means there's a systemic problem with a Search system affecting a large number of sites or Search users. 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, Google added.
I still suspect we will spot issues with Google Search well before Google confirms them on this dashboard. That being said, I am super excited that Google set up its systems to work with the Google Status systems for Google Search in the future.
Here is a podcast with more on this:
Plus Google has a new help document on how to use this dashboard.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
