Google Search bug caused by issue with its ‘indexing systems’

By Barry Schwartz

Published: August 11, 2020 at 11:52 am

Google has now explained the massive search bug from yesterday was related to an issue with its indexing systems.

Google wrote, “On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated.”

The confirmation. Here is the tweet confirming the issue and the explanation:

On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated.
Thank you for your patience!
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) August 11, 2020

More information. You can learn more about this issue and the impact on sites in our story from this morning.

Postscript. Many, including myself, were not too happy with the short explanation from Google. Gary Illyes from Google tweeted additional information about why the indexing system is vital to how search results show up:

The indexing system, Caffeine, does multiple things:
1. ingests fetchlogs,
2. renders and converts fetched data,
3. extracts links, meta and structured data,
4. extracts and computes some signals,
5. schedules new crawls,
6. and builds the index that is pushed to serving.
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) August 11, 2020

Don't oversimplify search for it's not simple at all: thousands of interconnected systems working together to provide users high quality and relevant results. Throw a grain of sand in the machinery and we have an outage like yesterday.
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) August 11, 2020

Google Caffeine launched in 2010. Learn more about Google Caffeine here.

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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.