Google launches 'Search Status Dashboard' to provide real-time service outages

The goal was to make reporting issues quick, accurate, and simple. According to the company, the dashboard will report on widespread issues that have occurred in the last seven days, along with some details and the current incident status.

Google has launched a 'Search Status Dashboard' that will notify users of real-time service outages if crawling, indexing, or serving search results are disrupted. 

Previously, the company collaborated with its Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) to externalise these outages on its Google Search Central Twitter account. 

In its blog post, Google said, "Over the last few years, we've been working with our SREs on improved ways to make information about major incidents generally accessible and useful."

Additionally, the company said, "The goal was to make reporting problems fast, accurate, and simple. As a result, we've launched a new status dashboard and streamlined the process of communicating during incidents."

This dashboard will report on the most common issues that have occurred in the last seven days, along with some details and the current status of the incident.

A widespread issue is a problem with a Search system that affects multiple sites or Search users at the same time.

"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," the company says of communicating incidents and updates.