Google’s search engine experienced a service disruption Thursday, delaying results from appearing from major news outlets and other sources publishing timely content.Some Google search engine users noticed the site was not surfacing new results for an approximately 10-hour period Thursday. They were able to verify that Google Search wasn’t indexing new content by testing a range of websites that post on an hourly or near-hourly basis and refining the post time to be within the “past hour,” like Barry Schwartz, who tested it with his own story reporting the disruption. On its Search status dashboard, Google says the issue started around 2 p.m. ET and persisted for over 10 hours until early Friday morning. This means that content published during this time may not have appeared in all searchers’ results, and Search users may have experienced issues finding content from major sites they were looking for.”We identified and fixed the issue with indexing. Sites may still experience some delayed indexing until the previously affected URLs have been reprocessed. There will be no more updates,” Google wrote in an update early Friday morning.
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Google Search has experienced indexing issues before, effectively hiding fresh results from being shown to users. Indexing disruptions occurred back in October last year, again in December, and in February this year.
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While the disruptions may only affect some users, such incidents pose a concern for those reliant on Google Search for breaking news, safety information, or other time-sensitive data in emergency situations. It is possible, however, to explore the web using search engine alternatives, like Brave or DuckDuckGo, to see what else is out there.
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