Google fixes issue with serving Search results

Google said you may see an error page when doing a search.

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Google had an issue serving or showing search results to some searchers today. You may have seen error pages when searching on Google.com.

What Google said. Google posted this message on its search status dashboard at 11:01 a.m. ET:

  • “There’s an ongoing issue with serving search results. Users may see an error page when doing a search. We’re working on fixing the issue. Next update will be within 12 hours.”

What is next. Expect Google to work to fix this issue quickly because if Google is unable to fully serve search results, that can impact their ad revenue in a big way. There are unofficial estimates that more than 2 million searches are conducted per minute on Google.

I have not seen any serving issues with Google Search, but I suspect some users are.

Why we care. If you notice a drop in traffic from Google Search to your sites today, this may be one reason why. Google is working on fixing the issue and it should be resolved soon.

Now fixed. The serving issue was fixed ess than an hour later, Google reported via its search status dashboard at 11:51 a.m. ET:

  • “We fixed the issue with serving search results. There will be no more updates.”

The headline of the story was changed to reflect the resolution.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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