Search Status Dashboard introduced to provide real-time outages

SAN FRANCISCO: Google has introduced a "Search Status Dashboard" that will inform users of real-time service outages if there's an issue with crawling, indexing, or serving search results.

Earlier, the company had worked with their Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) to externalise these disruptions on its Google Search Central Twitter account.

"Over the past couple of years, we've been working with our SREs on improved ways to make information about major incidents generally accessible and useful," Google said in a blogpost.

The goal was to make reporting issues quick, accurate, and easy. As a result, we have launched a new status dashboard and simplified the process of communicating during incidents," it added.

This dashboard will report the widespread issues occurring in the last 7 days, with some details and the current status of the incident.

A widespread issue refers to a problem with a Search system that affects many sites or Search users at once.

To communicate incidents and updates, the company says "once we confirm with SREs that there is an ongoing, widespread issue in Search, we strive to post an incident on the dashboard within an hour, and to provide successive updates within 12 hours".