Google Search Indexing Problems Resolved After Day Of Stale Results
A Google spokesperson didn’t respond to questions from CRN on what caused the indexing problems in the first place or how Google went about fixing them.
Google announced early Thursday that its indexing issues had been resolved after struggling Tuesday to index new content in its search results.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based technology giant announced the resolution and thanked users for their patience in a 1:05 a.m. ET tweet Thursday. A Google spokesperson confirmed to CRN that publishers should be seeing an improvements, but didn't respond to questions on either what caused the indexing problems in the first place or how Google went about fixing them.
The bug was first spotted by users early Wednesday morning, and was most pronounced when using Google's "past hour" search filter. Site command searches with the "past hour" filter on didn't turn up any results, while general searches with the "past hour" filter turned on generated completely unrelated results.
[Related: Google Indexing Problems Resulting In Some Stale Search Results]
Google first confirmed the problem in a 9:40 a.m. ET tweet Wednesday. By mid-afternoon Wednesday, users were reporting that relevant results were finally beginning to appear using Google's "past hour" filter.
As a result of the indexing problems, Google users in India were unable to find timely and fresh news coverage of their 2019 general election. Web publishers in India complained that they were still getting results in top stories that dated back to 2018 or even 2015.
Google has suffered from widespread issues around its index and associated tools since a March update. On April 8, a significant issue caused the company to de-index many of its web pages.
Later that month, Google acknowledged that data from between April 9 and April 25 was missing from the Google Search Console due to an issue with the company's indexed pages report. Google has not offered any public explanation of what is causing all these issues.