In the last Search Off The Record podcast, Gary Illyes from the Google Search team said that sometimes issues can arise within the Google Search results due to two experiments that conflict with each other. He said at the 19:41 mark, “Very often there are experiments that need to be rolled back because two experiments might interact very badly with each other.”

Here is the video embed where he said this:

Lizzi Sassman from Google asked Gary Illyes:

Gary Illyes responded:

Thanks to Glenn Gabe who posted this on X who wrote, “Sometimes problems in the SERPs (or maybe what we see as changes) are due to multiple experiments running that don’t work well with each other. When Google sees that, it might need to roll back those experiments (or ramp them down). Also, Gary explains that faulty data pushes could cause issues too. Google could roll back to the data push before that. Just another set of variables to consider when you see weird changes in the SERPs.”

He then goes into how one time cosmic rays caused issue for Google Search.

So it is not only Google algorithm updates that cause issues in the search results.

Forum discussion at X.