Search Status
Everything is up.
A search engine is the last thing most people suspect and the first thing they notice, because when it fails there is no obvious way to look up why. The engine itself going down is genuinely rare. What fails more often is one surface of it: image search, maps, or the AI answer panel, while ordinary results keep working.
The other reason search looks broken is that it sits behind DNS. A resolver problem takes out the search box before anything else, and the symptom is indistinguishable from the engine being unreachable.
- up
- slow
- down
- no reading
Common questions about search engines
Filters, region settings and a stale preferences cookie all suppress results without an error. A private window with no cookies is the quickest way to separate a broken account state from a broken service.
Yes, and it is one of the most common causes. If the resolver cannot answer, the browser never reaches the engine at all, which looks the same as the engine failing. Trying a different resolver settles it.