Google: Occasionally, search experiments clash, leading to issues
In the latest episode of the "Search Off The Record" podcast, Gary Illyes from the Google Search team discussed how conflicts between search experiments can sometimes cause issues in Google Search results. At the 19:41 mark, he mentioned, "Very often there are experiments that need to be rolled back because two experiments might interact very badly with each other." Lizzi Sassman from Google then asked Illyes about the potential impact of recent changes. Illyes elaborated, explaining that experiments often need to be rolled back when they trigger alerts indicating something has gone wrong, typically due to bad interactions between the experiments. This process involves identifying the faulty experiment and rolling it back or ramping it down.
Illyes also highlighted the role of data pushes in these issues, using the example of Google Doodles. He described how losing data during a push could result in visual anomalies, like a white line through a doodle, which would be flagged by monitoring systems. The team would then investigate the issue, pinpoint the problematic data push, and roll back to the previous state to fix it.
Glenn Gabe shared these insights on X, noting that problems in search engine results pages (SERPs) might stem from multiple conflicting experiments or faulty data pushes. He emphasized that these variables, alongside algorithm updates, could lead to unexpected changes in SERPs. Illyes even recounted an instance where cosmic rays caused issues for Google Search, underscoring that it's not only algorithm updates that can affect search results.
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