Google Removes Search Features Bug Confirmation But Replaces It With Google Discover Search Console Reporting Error

Google has done something unusual, it has removed one of the confirmed data anomalies notes about a search features bug, and added a new note confirming a bug with Google Discover logging resulting in a data drop in the Search Console Discover performance reports on October 23rd.

As a reminder, Google posted on October 28th that there was a bug in Google Search with some search features including but not limited to Top Stories. I captured the message and linked to it above but if you don’t believe me, here it is in the Wayback Machine. Here is what Google wrote “Google released a fix to a bug that primarily affected some search features, such as Top Stories, and that became most noticeable around October 18-19. The bug fix will take about a week to fully rollout.” So I assume it was fixed but why remove this note? Why not annotate the note?

And then, Google added a new note, dated October 23rd, impacting Google Discover. The issue was with a logging error that caused a drop with the Google Discover performance report on October 23rd. This was not a bug with Google Search results, it was just a reporting glitch and the search results were not impacted.

Here is what the page looked like before:

Here is what it looks like now:

So if you notice a drop in Google Discover on October 23rd in your Search Console reports, that was a bug with the report. Regarding October 18th through 28th, I am really not sure…

As a note, I did ask Google for more details on the October 28th note, which I never got.

Update: John Mueller said on Mastodon it was removed because Google doesn’t document search bugs on that page, he said “The complication is basically that we don’t have a great place to put things like this, but we’ll figure it out. The “text” there is still relevant, we just don’t have a good place to put it.”

Forum discussion at Mastodon.

Update 2: Later this afternoon, Google added the notice back, with some changes, here is a screenshot: