# An update on 2019

Friday, December 27, 2019


With 2020 hanging above our heads much the same way that bricks don't, people start reflecting
on what they achieved this year, what went wrong, and how they could improve. We're no different,
but instead of choosing what went well or wrong ourselves, we picked the
announcements on our
[@GoogleWMC](https://twitter.com/googlesearchc) Twitter account that
users interacted with the most, and decided to reflect on those.


We had launches that you appreciated a lot. For example, we
[announced at Google I/O](https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1125854639943872512)
that
[Googlebot is becoming evergreen](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/05/the-new-evergreen-googlebot),
meaning that it's always going to use an up-to-date version of Chromium for rendering. We hope
that this will make it easier for developers to create stunning, modern, and snappy JavaScript
experiences, by tapping onto the power of over 1000 new features and interfaces that are now
supported.


Speaking of robots, together with the
[original author of the Robots Exclusion Protocol](https://www.greenhills.co.uk/),
other search engines, and input from webmasters, we submitted an
[Internet Draft](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-koster-rep-00)
to the IETF in order to start standardizing the 25-year-old protocol.
![Googlebot unboxing a website](https://developers.google.com/static/search/blog/images/import/2f8eb480371af081a74b0f482db62a23.png)


Like
[Twitter users](https://twitter.com/TidmanKrista/status/1145710824998264832),
we also thought it's an
[exciting project](https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1145693840201986048)
which lays down the rules of crawling for good, although it doesn't change anything for most.


But we haven't stopped there with touching ancient protocols: we also rethought how we need to treat
[`nofollow` links](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/qualify-outbound-links)
to keep up with the evolution of the web. It was an announcement that seemed to be welcomed by
most Twitter users, and for a good reason: having a
["hint" model for `rel="nofollow"`](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify)
may help us reward those who create high quality content more, by serving even better results to our users.


One of the most tweeted -- and also most humbling -- moments this year was when we
[lost a part of our index](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/08/when-indexing-goes-wrong-how-google),
which caused Search Console to misbehave, and also had rendering failures roughly the same time.
Since Google Search works like a well oiled machine most of the time, we didn't have processes to
quickly communicate issues to those who should know about them: webmasters. Lacking a proper
process and channel to communicate these issues was a mistake and we are still working hard to
rectify it, however one thing is clear: we need to do more on the critical communication side of
things.


We do like to communicate, in general:
[we shoot videos](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/google-search-news-coming-soon-to), we go to
conferences, big and small, where we reach thousands of webmasters and SEOs, and in 2019 we
extended our reach with the
[Webmaster Conference](https://developers.google.com/search/events/search-central-live), which
landed in 35 locations around the world in 12 languages. Not to mention the
[weather reports](https://youtu.be/78GFh553Vbc?t=311) on our
[YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@GoogleSearchCentral).


We hope you had a fantastic year and the new year will bring you even more success. If you need
help with the latter, you can follow [our blogs](https://developers.google.com/search/blog),
[@googlewmc](https://twitter.com/googlesearchc) on Twitter, or you
could join us at a
[Webmaster Conference](https://developers.google.com/search/events/search-central-live) near you!


Posted by
[John Mueller](https://twitter.com/johnmu?rel=reviewer), Cheese
Connoisseur, and [Gary Illyes](https://garyillyes.com/+?lang=en) the
house elf