Many online service platforms usually resort to external communication channels to inform their users or clients when their services suffer some type of technical incident. In fact, Google itself has a Twitter account to report any technical incident related to searches, whether due to crawling, indexing of websites or the search service itself, although luckily, the Technical incidents usually occur on rare occasions.

For the sake of transparency, Google now wants to provide as much information as possible about these technical incidents related to searches. To that end, it is introducing the new Search Status Dashboard, fulfilling its desire to be able to deliver problem reports in the fastest, most accurate, and easiest-to-understand way.

To better understand the incidents that may arise

According to Google, the new panel will offer information about the generalized incidents that have occurred in the last seven days, also adding some details and the current status of the problem that has appeared.

According to Google…:

A widespread problem means that there is a systemic problem with a search system that affects a large number of search sites or users. Typically, these types of issues are highly visible externally, and internally SRE monitoring and alert mechanisms are working behind the scenes to flag problems.

Google undertakes to share the existence of an incident within one hour from the moment it was confirmed, and consecutive updates within twelve hours from that moment.

It will consider an incident or technical problem solved when the application of the necessary changes ends with the impact on the system, although the affected sites may still suffer some effects for a while until the processing requests can be carried out, according to the incident type.

For those more interested in learning about the new dashboard, Google has a dedicated page on the Search Status Dashboard with more information within Google Search Central.

More information: Google