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I have the following search in a bookmark:

https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=intags%3amine%20is%3aquestion%20answers%3a0%20closed%3ano

This is equivalent to the Stack Overflow search intags:mine is:question answers:0 closed:no and then selecting the Newest tab.

Today it hasn't been updating its results. Nothing newer than 5 hours ago is being returned.

UPDATE:

I just tried again, now it's only 1 hour behind.

UPDATE 2:

It's up-to-date now (2021-06-21 21:57 UTC).

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8
  • I also have basically the same problem on Math SE (with it also being 5 hours for StackOverflow, but it being no results newer than about 6 hours for the Math site). Note that I reported a very similar problem 8 months ago at Intermittent problems trying to get the correct question search results for just my tags on the Math site. My post didn't get any responses, official or otherwise, back then. Nonetheless, I hope you get some sort of appropriate response.
    – John Omielan
    Jun 21, 2021 at 20:25
  • I was able to reproduce this earlier when trying to reproduce Questions filter “not” keyword; I wanted to search for the latest laravel questions to see if they’ve been retagged, but only found 5h old ones. Intermittently, one of my bookmarked searches even returned 0 results. Also, questions linked in comments actually appearing in the Linked section seems quite delayed lately.
    – Sebastian Simon
    Jun 21, 2021 at 20:31
  • It has been broken client-side previously: meta.stackexchange.com/a/366345/282094 since the FAQ says watched tags must be used: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19173/… - MSE has a help message ("Improve your results by setting your favorite tags.") not shown on SO, which might indicate if it's not working.
    – Rob
    Jun 21, 2021 at 20:36
  • @SebastianSimon On several occasions, I also intermittently got back no results at all when I was doing a search on the Math site, similar to what my linked post described.
    – John Omielan
    Jun 21, 2021 at 20:36
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    I have pinged the SRE team. I know there was some maintenance being done on Elastic today, so it might be from that.
    – Taryn
    Jun 21, 2021 at 20:46
  • 1
    @JohnOmielan I saw your question when I was searching for similar, and had a suspicion they might be related. I also intermittently get no results instead of old results.
    – Barmar
    Jun 21, 2021 at 21:06
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    @Taryn Looks like it's cleared up now.
    – Barmar
    Jun 21, 2021 at 21:58
  • @Taryn It's stuck again, 9 hours.
    – Barmar
    Jul 4, 2021 at 22:34

1 Answer 1

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SRE here. Sorry I couldn't respond sooner. In some cases during maintenance we need to disable the background process that updates the search index. Typically this isn't disabled for more than a few minutes so there's no significant impact. Yesterday we ran into problems and had to correct them before turning the indexing back on.

We're looking at how we can better plan and notify for these type of events, as well as ways to increase resilience so no interruption in the process is necessary.

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  • Thanks. I've occasionally seen it last 30+ minutes, and assumed it was something like that. This was the first time in my experience that it lasted several hours.
    – Barmar
    Jun 22, 2021 at 18:18
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    This problem recurred yesterday, and still hasn't been resolved.
    – Barmar
    Jul 5, 2021 at 14:19
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    @Barmar there was a search outage on the 5th. I'll make sure we get something posted as part of our retrospective. Sorry for the delayed response. I've been out since the 3rd.
    – Mike Frank Staff
    Jul 14, 2021 at 17:35

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