Google claims that it is impossible to prevent outages, but the company is working to improve its ability to notify the community when problems are detected.
Google’s Search Relations team, which consists of John Mueller, Martin Splitt, and Gary Illyes, discusses this topic.
They discuss what to expect from Google in 2022 and beyond in the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast.
They discuss whether there will be fewer outages this year, among other things.
Unfortunately, Google is unable to make that guarantee.
However, Google will communicate with you more frequently when outages and bugs are discovered.
Here are some highlights from the Google outage discussion.
Google Outages Will Continue To Happen
Outages will undoubtedly continue, so don’t be surprised if one occurs.
As Illyes points out, Google is run by computers, which are prone to outages from time to time.
Mueller:
“So, another theme that came up, I guess towards the end of last year, was everything around outages where something went wrong in Search, or something got stuck in Search Console, and it felt like there are lots of these happening. Is that something that you think the Search side will fix so there are no more outages and everyone will be happy?”
Illyes:
“I mean, we have outages. I mean, they are computers. Computers have outages every now and then, and we are trying to be as redundant as possible when it comes to processing units. But we are still going to have outages.”
As Mueller points out, it appeared that outages were becoming more frequent toward the end of last year, but that wasn’t always the case.
Illyes goes on to explain how that perception arose as a result of Google improving its outage communication.
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Google To Be More Transparent About Outages
Last year, Google began to talk more about outages, giving the impression that they were happening more frequently.
According to Illyes, the problem isn’t that there have been more outages, but that Google has begun to announce outages that would otherwise go unnoticed.
“One thing to note is that we did start to talk more about outages, and previously, you could just not notice the outages because we were not talking about them, and it affected only a small portion of the Internet, for example.”
You can expect more of the same in the future.
Even if a search outage is not noticed by the search community, Google will still announce it when it is discovered internally.
“We are announcing outages even if they were not noticed externally yet, or they were noticed by a certain geographic region, for example. And at least the perception will be that we are having more outages. I think our SRE team, the Site Reliability Engineers, they would prefer to have fewer outages, but it’s up to them to make that happen.”
While it may appear that there are more outages, this is simply due to Google acknowledging and discussing them more.
It’s not that there are more outages occurring.
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