Highlights –

  • Danny Sullivan, the organization’s public search liaison, acknowledged in a tweet that the service is momentarily inaccessible due to an unidentified issue.
  • The same timer widget had a stopwatch capability for times when you need to count up rather than down in addition to the timer.

Until recently, searching for a timer was easily possible using Google. A ten-minute timer would instantly appear if one just typed a query like “10-minute timer.” However, rumors that this feature has abruptly vanished from Google began to surface last month. Even today, the feature is missing.

It appears that Google did not choose to discontinue the useful feature suddenly. Danny Sullivan, the organization’s public search liaison, acknowledged in a tweet that the service is momentarily inaccessible due to an unidentified issue. “We have an issue that we’ve been looking [into],” Sullivan tweeted in response to this story, “we expect to have it back fairly soon.”

Even as there is no shortage of timers available elsewhere on the internet (or included as standard apps on iOS and Android), Google’s built-in timer provides a straightforward, accessible solution. Additionally, the same widget had a stopwatch capability for times when you need to count up rather than down in addition to the timer.

It was in 2013 that the tech giant introduced the timer feature in its search engine, and it had no relation to search. Users could search for anything such as “14-minute timer” or “timer until 2 pm”, and Google would present a widget, and the countdown would begin automatically. Well, the Google Search timer seems to be on halt, at least for now.

Yet, one can still give a voice command through Google Assistant to set up a timer. But a text command won’t work anymore on both mobile and desktop. Instead, users will be primarily treated to YouTube results.

On July 21, Danny Sullivan of Google initially promised to look at the problem. On July 27, over a week later, the crew was “still checking on it.”

Initial worries were that Google had deliberately removed the feature. However, that would have been surprising considering that the business has primarily spent the last decade adding new features to its search results page, not removing them. What was once just a list of hyperlinks now has anything from rich snippets that try to immediately respond to your search query to a separate box for news headlines and even more specialized features, like an integrated flight price comparison tool. All of these seem to be standing still.