Google News fixes indexing problems

Added by Monique Robinson on July 21, 2011

Google fixed an issue on Thursday that prevented its Google News from gathering new articles from various Google News-approved web sites.

A number of publishers, sites that are approved by Google News to provide content to the service, posted messages on Google News Publishers Troubleshooting forum about articles not appearing on Google News on Tuesday. Normally Google News acquires new content from approved web sites within minutes, making it possible for Google users to view excerpts, search, and link to publishing sites. Publishers reported slow to no indexing at all, even though Google’s crawlers continued to visit their sites.

Late Wednesday night, at Google News Publishers Troubleshooting forum, a Google employee responded to a large thread with about 20 replies in it. The Google employee’s response said that Google was looking into the problem, much to the relief of the affected publishers. Publishers like the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal were not affected by the problem.

After a few hours the same Google employee responded on the same thread in the Google News Publishers Troubleshooting forum, “An error in our system was preventing our crawlers from indexing a group of sites and causing delays in when content appeared on Google News. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. The cause of this error has been identified and our system should begin to include your content again shortly”.

On Thursday Google News appeared to be working as it was before the problem – publishers on Google News Publishers Troubleshooting forum said in posts that their content was being indexed normally. Several publishers posts noted that they had not seen a problem like this in many years, making the problem possibly the worst that some publishers experienced to date, yet Google’s diligence in monitoring the forum and their timely response likely prevented the underlying problem from causing any lasting effects.