Google randomly stopped showing search results to some users

Google is probably the most visited website on the planet. It’s almost everyone’s home page, it has an Alexa rank of 1, and it’s basically the world’s knowledge database as well. This website embraced search and became a popular starting point for finding anything online, making the word “Google” a verb.

Now, let’s say you wake up one day and realize that your Google search doesn’t yield any results – no results at all. That’s exactly what happened to many visitors to the Google Search website yesterday, according to reports on Twitter and complaints on the Google Web Search Help forum.

This issue caused users to type a query into Google’s search box and receive an error message that the query “did not match any documents.” Some users reported that clearing their cache or signing out of their Google account and signing back in resolved the issue, while others reported that clearing their browsing history resolved the issue.

Google’s Danny Sullivan responded to people’s concerns and complaints: I work on the search team at Google. We are investigating this to better understand and resolve it soon. It would have been helpful if someone could share specifically what they think might be the cause. The more details you can share, the more help we can track this. ”

Update: We believe this issue is now resolved.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 27, 2019

He later said the issue was “impacting a small number of users” and that the company was “actively investigating it and expects it to be resolved soon.” However, when your user base is in the billions, “few users” is generally not small.

Fortunately, Danny Sullivan has since tweeted that the company believes the issue has been resolved. If you encountered this problem, it should have been fixed already. If it’s not fixed, please visit the Google Web Search help thread for the issue.

Featured image courtesy of Stephen Fry ( Twitter )