Google has officially launched a new dashboard page dedicated to notifying users about any issues occurring with Google Search.

The dashboard, available at status.search.google.com, will highlight any outages occurring to Google’s search engine, along with problems crawling, indexing, or serving pages to Search.

As the company said: 

“As we head into 2023, we want to introduce another tool for the public to understand the most current status of systems which impact Search – crawling, indexing, and serving.”

Of course, Google’s search engine is one of the most reliable online services around, though outages do occur and other issues do pop up from time to time. 

The announcement goes into further detail:

“This dashboard reports widespread issues occurring in the last 7 days, with some details and the current status of the incident. A widespread issue means there’s a systemic problem with a Search system affecting a large number of sites or Search users. Typically these kinds of issues are very visible externally, and internally the SREs’ monitoring and alerting mechanisms are working behind the scenes to flag the issues.”

“Once we confirm with SREs that there’s an ongoing, widespread issue in Search, we aim to post an incident on the dashboard within an hour, and consecutive updates to the incident within 12 hours. Unlike with a traditional automated dashboard, our global staff reports these updates. The start time of the incident is generally when we managed to confirm the issue.”

Most importantly, you will now be able to immediately identify if sudden drops in traffic or other problems are related to your site or Google’s systems. In the past, the only way to confirm any ongoing problems with Google’s search engines was to contact the company directly.