On a daily basis I see complaints around the new beta Search Console which began rolling out recently about how it is missing many of the features from the old version. Google is aware of these complaints and is not removing the old version anytime soon. They even posted a survey asking about which features you like or dislike so they can continue to improve it.
That being said, I did ask John Mueller of Google if Google plans on removing any features completely from the old one when they port stuff over to the new one. He said no, not that he is aware of. He said there will be consolidation, so the reporting tools might show one report with filters to see multiple data points, like rich cards and AMP and job listings, etc all on one report with various filters. But as far as he knows, they want to bring over all the features from the old version to the new one.
John said in a hangout live, "I'm not aware of anything that we would like drop completely."
He said this at the 29:27 mark into the video:
Question:
There's a lot of confusion about, and you see it, probably drives you crazy, about the beta or I don't know if you call it beta anymore, that it's basically not including all the features that people are using the old version. Obviously you are not gonna produce a roadmap, but I assume you know what you're going to be porting. Like the fetch as Google and I don't know any certain types of link reports and stuff like that. Are there any way that you guys could be a little more transparent about what is going to be moved and maybe what you for sure know is not going to be moved over, so that people could prepare maybe other tool makers can make their own tools around that?
Answer:
I guess it's specifically about what what won't be moved in that case to kind of make it easier for other people to create something that replaces it?I I don't know that's that's an interesting question. That's something that we can definitely look into.
I think they they added a link to a form recently where they they're collecting feedback on what people actually want within the new search console. So that's probably a useful way to figure out what people don't care about at all. But it's also tricky in the sense that sometimes people want something that from our point of view doesn't make so much sense. Like the old keywords report, where from our point of view that's something that was more misleading than actually useful. But still a lot of people thought that was really interesting to look at. So that's that's tricky.
Offhand I don't know of anything about was would be removed because we try to clean things up as we move along.
What probably happened is that some things get combined. Like the structure Data Report, the rich cards report, and now the rich results report, they're all kind of focusing on the same things. And some of them even use the old name. So I could imagine at some point it makes sense to take all of that and just like make one clean report out of that rather than three or four individual ones.
But otherwise I'm not aware of anything that we would like drop completely.
Here is the video embed:
I guess time will tell for sure...
Forum discussion at Google+.
Update: Well, 24 hours later, or less, Google's Gary Illyes may have said the exact opposite. See this post.
