Google Search suffers unprecedented outage, fixes the bug

Google has suffered a massive technical glitch in its Search algorithm that left users clueless as the searches threw weird results globally.

The glitch affected the web crawling and indexing system called Caffeine that allows Google to process data faster.

While several users thought Google Search was going through an update, it actually suffered a technical issue as the week began, reports Search Engine Journal.

According to Google Webmasters, it detected an issue with the 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!" it tweeted on Tuesday.

Google's John Mueller tweeted on Wednesday: "I don't have all the details yet, but it seems like this was a glitch on our side and has been fixed in the meantime".

The Caffeine indexing system helps Google to continually index the entire web in real-time.

Google's Gary Illyes tweeted: "The indexing system, Caffeine, does multiple things: Ingests fetch logs, renders and converts fetched data, extracts links, meta and structured data, extracts and computes some signals, schedules new crawls, and builds the index that is pushed to serving."

He continued: "If something goes wrong with most of the things that it's supposed to do, that will show downstream in some way.

"If scheduling goes awry, crawling may slow down. If rendering goes wrong, we may misunderstand the pages. If index building goes bad, ranking & serving may be affected."

The issue has now been fixed.

"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," Illyes further said.