Google Search is indexing has halted | Hacker News Reader

Google Search is indexing has halted

twitter.com

84 pointsalpb23 comments

Apparently now fixed:

"20 Jun 2024 22:06 PDT We identified and fixed the issue with indexing. Sites may still experience some delayed indexing until the previously affected URLs have been reprocessed. There will be no more updates."

https://status.search.google.com/incidents/Gjz5TP3aaDRmKsSWg...

6 minutes earlier"

"Google is investigating reports about delayed indexing in Google Search. We're working on identifying the root cause. Next update will be within 12 hours."

I doubt they did it in 6 minutes!

It's possible, if it was some silly omission. Also, it takes a few minutes before a status like that is posted in the first place. (Possibly different teams)

There's a delay as information makes its way from engineering to external comms.

Very likely, the indexing issue happened late in the afternoon after the comms person had gone home for the day (the tweet is 4:00 PM), a situation room was convened with a bunch of SREs and engineers with expertise, they sent an e-mail to external comms saying "Post that we're having issues with indexing", they got to work diagnosing the problem, they pushed a fix in a couple hours, and then they sent another e-mail saying "The issue is fixed."

The external comms person checks their phone after the kids have gone to bed, sees an urgent message about an indexing failure, posts that on the status blog, then checks the rest of their e-mail and sees that it's resolved, so they post that.

Plausible but likely wrong.

A dedicated comms person is part of the incident response team.

https://sre.google/sre-book/managing-incidents/

Wouldn't be the first Google product that they killed :)

nothing is safe from the google graveyard!

I'm not a search expert but is the index halted, or is there an issue with serving the results? so there are results in the database but for some reason the query that it sent times out or something and nothing comes back.

How are we supposed to know, being outside of Google?

yea fair point, the person who posted the tweet says the indexing stopped, I'm just highlighting there's probably another reason why that's case.

By being aware of some leaked information that's not already on TFA, that we heard/read elsewhere, DUH!

Besides, several people on HN are inside of FAANG companies like Google - and they often share internal stuff and gossip.

Maybe if someone recently spotted their crawler somewhere.

Maybe they'll shut it down. It's become useless, just a heap of commercials and AI-generated rubbish :D

Drastic measures to avoid model degradation because of feedback loops ;)

They're just shutting down cost centers :)

>Sites like the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, CNN, Forbes, and others are showing very few new pages being indexed in the past hour by Google Search.

Is this only affecting news sites then?

I assume they just happened to scoop this one because they probably obsessively monitor the SEO metrics (including indexed pages) and were uniquely positioned to immediately report on it to a large audience

I saw people in the Twitter thread jumping to the conclusion that this is intentional and a move to surfacing the index through AI instead of public search. Wild how quickly people jump to something malicious and outlandish instead of the default which is, you know, some shit is probably borked.

Sure, but it’s probably not a coincidence that this outage occurred shortly after their rollout of AI results. One could reasonably speculate that Google added some extra work to their indexing process (e.g. to create embeddings), and underestimated the impact of this change on resource consumption.

Typo in the title. Should be “Google Search’s indexing has halted”. (More likely not a typo but a transcription error.)

If this in any way would impact revenue, I'm sure it would have become a code yellow in mere instants.

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