WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH GOOGLE’S INDEXING SITUATION? WILL IT PERSONALLY AFFECT ME?

When you hear that Google’s indexing methods have undergone a malfunction, your first reaction may be that of panic. But this is why you don’t need to worry.

The indexing situation has been resolved, and searches impacted by this feature should not be impacted any more.

But, in order to fully understand what indexing is and why this could/couldn’t affect you in the future, keep reading.

What is indexing?

When a search engine says that it uses an indexing method, this essentially means a database is used by the search engine in order to generate results. The same can be seen here in the situation of Google. Essentially, this database contains the information of the results that the said search engine was able to generate, meaning that if the search engine experiences a shutdown similar to this, we may observe a change in the results, leading to a less reliable search engine, as these websites are no longer stored in the database.

But how am I impacted as a searcher?

Essentially, you are no longer impacted. But, when the malfunction does happen, you may see fewer representative results for your search being generated, due to this gap in the website data available that is stored on Google’s database. Fortunately, Google seems to have caught this mistake before anyone was keen enough to notice, making the impact extremely minimal.

However, the potential for problems such as this can lead to a truly unreliable search engine, possibly making mistakes such as this fatal for search engines who claim full representativeness and reliability.

Why does this happen?

In order to generate reliable results, these search engines often use reliable databasing systems to catalogue their web addresses. Google uses a database site called Caffeine. This allows it to process a variety of data much faster and in a more organised way than other methods. It usually follows a strict system of cataloguing such as getting the data, converting the data, extracting useful information from the data and setting up retrieval processes for the data, which results in the creation of a final indexing system.

Therefore, it is quite clear to see that when one of these factors glitch out or malfunction, we are able to see the misrepresentation or complete elimination of search results generated. This is exactly what briefly happened with Google.

For example, despite not formally disclosed, it could be something like improper cataloguing, or something went wrong when transcribing the raw data into comprehensive data understandable by the readers.

A common error in data storage as well, is the failure of retrieval processes. It may have been the case that the data was there, but actually receiving it upon command didn’t work, thus generating odd and inaccurate search results.