In a new edition of their Search Off the Record podcast, Google discusses the reasons behind the Search Status Dashboard, the kind of occurrences it will cover, and why it won’t be possible to translate updates into other languages.
Google Search Status Dashboard
A new Search Status Dashboard that notifies users of outages was just introduced by Google.
Because it’s an easy way for consumers and service providers to interact, service status pages are frequently used by services like web hosting.
Why Google is Publishing a Search Status Dashboard
Prior to Twitter, Google issued sporadic outage alerts, but this method had drawbacks that made it less than ideal, according to Google employees.
The podcast mentioned that, following the significant search failures of 2019 that made it look as though the entire index had crashed, Google had promised a dashboard back in 2019.
Gay Illyes explained:
“Well, one of the reasons is that we promised it in 2019, so… we said that we would have a more structured and better communication channel for Search incidents.
So that was one of the motivations for the dashboard.
…there was a perception that we are not doing enough.
So we kind of both internally and externally, and then we kind of wanted to fix that because, you know, I was told that
we have to be nice.”
Posting on Twitter Has a Lot of Overhead
The programme then moved on to talk about how tough it is to decide whether outages are significant enough to warrant a tweet and how many people must be consulted before a tweet is written.
The lack of templates for the tweets made the task of communicating an outage even more complicated.
Lizzi Sassman explained:
“Well, but the actual posting is not that long. It’s actually coming up with the wording. Like, that seemed to trip everyone up.
In previous times we’ve talked about this, it’s like, ‘What should we say and how to say it and when to say it?’
Gary Illyes: Yeah, that’s the other thing that on Twitter, we were not using templates.
So basically, every time on the spot, we came up with something, and then, if someone was around, like John, or you or someone, as in John Mueller–
Then we would double-check, basically a peer review, and then we would post if it looks good.
Lizzi Sassman:
I mean, but this, it wasn’t just like a peer review thing. There were way more people involved for these big messages.”
The Dashboard May Eventually Show More
The current Search Status Dashboard only covers three kinds of outages to search:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Serving
Gary Illyes explained what the three outage types cover:
“So we map the dashboard to the major search systems, which is crawling, indexing, serving. And the incidents would go into those buckets.
- So, for example, if for whatever reason Googlebot cannot crawl the whole internet, that would end up in the crawling bucket.
- If there is some canonicalization problem that’s affecting lots of sites, then that would end up in the indexing bucket.
- And then if Google.com is not accessible to lots of users, then that would end up in the serving bucket.
Those three outage types are for version 1 of the dashboard.”
According to the podcast, they plan to monitor how this version of the Search Status Dashboard performs before maybe adding more sorts of outages in the future.
“John Mueller:
And what if there’s just one specific feature in Search that is kind of broken? I don’t know, let’s say the Featured Snippets are not showing anymore.Is that something that we would show here?
Gary Illyes:
That was a good question. In this version, we are only focusing on major incidents affecting the systems that we mentioned, like crawling, indexing, and serving.
In the next iteration, we are thinking about exposing Search features.
So, for example, Top Stories or Feature Snippets or whatever, if they would go down for whatever reason, then we might communicate something about those incidents.
But in the current iteration, I don’t think that we would externalize those issues.
Lizzi Sassman:
Would that be if Top Stories just stops appearing altogether, like a serving issue?
Or like certain sites saying like, “I’m not appearing as a top story. Like there’s a problem.”
Gary Illyes:
I mean either, depending on how many sites are affected.
John Mueller: And like, I don’t know, related services to Search, like maybe Discover or Google News…
If those went down, would that also be listed here or is this really focused on web search?
Gary Illyes:
No, that would be yet another version.
We know that some services want to appear on the dashboard, but we have to think about how to present other, basically, services.
And I just didn’t have either time or nerves to think about that just yet.
Plus, I think it would be valuable to just launch V1 and then see how it goes, whether we can learn something from it.
And then see if we can improve it by including other services.”
No Plans for Translations
The new status page will not have a translated version, according to the podcast.
The Google employees claim that the translation of the dashboard announcements is beyond the capabilities of their CMS.
They believe that people who cannot read English should be able to use a service like Google Translate.
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 impossible 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 that we share with other Google products or Alphabet products.
And it is developed to be as simple as it needs to be to serve the dashboard, itself. And no complexity to it whatsoever.
And translations would be a major complexity because then you have to load the different translations from different rows in the database that are serving the content.
…Basically, if you are using Google Translate, for example, or any other translation, online translation software, then that will give you enough clue about what’s happening.
Lizzi Sassman: I think with this, it’s also particularly time-sensitive.
So if there was a delay to translate the thing, then that language would be behind or not having the same timeline of events, which could be an issue.
And then people might think like, “Oh, is this not affecting Search in French or something because it’s not been translated in French?
Or it didn’t happen for like three days, does that mean anything?” When like, no, it just means that the translation is behind.”
Search Status Dashboard
Receiving notifications about outages at Google is easy with the Search Status Dashboard.
For those who use them, there is an RSS feed (available here) that makes getting notifications simple.
The dashboard’s value is in its ability to identify whether a change in ranking is the result of a problem with the site or is widespread across Google search.
It’s also available on YouTube:
For more such tips, updates and learning resources, stay tuned to Insitebuild Blog.
