Bug: Google Social Search Goes Offline Temporarily

By Barry Schwartz

Published: November 16, 2009 at 9:29 am

Over the weekend, I received several emails, noticed dozens of Tweets, saw several forum posts and noticed for myself that Google Social Search experimental search feature went offline.

If you have opt in to the Social Search feature at google.com/experimental you will notice an error on your Google searches that reads, “The experiment you’re trying to access is no longer available. Go to experiments overview.”

Google has confirmed this is a temporary issue and that a fix will be in place sometime today or tomorrow. Here is Google’s official statement on this matter:

The Google Social Search experiment is temporarily down. We are working on it and expect to restore access sometime Monday or Tuesday.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a technologist and 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.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.