Google has shut down Duplex on the Web and has retired its web crawler, DuplexWeb-Google. Google posted a notice of this in this help document saying “Duplex on the Web is deprecated, and will no longer be supported as of December, 2022. Any automation features enabled by Duplex on the Web will no longer be supported after this date.”
Duplex on the web. Google called this feature “Duplex on the web,” and it allowed users to use the Google Assistant for new reservations and other purchase categories. It would call a restaurant, for example, to book a table reservation for dinner, when you asked Google to book you a reservation.
It worked for movie tickets, assisting with checking out for online retail stores, food ordering, flight check-ins, password changes and discount finders.
DuplexWeb-Google crawler. With the deprecation of Duplex on the Web, Google has retired the DuplexWeb-Google web crawler. Google posted in this other help document, about the deprecation of this web crawler.
Google also added a new section to the Google crawler document for retired crawlers:
Why we care. If you saw crawling activity from DuplexWeb-Google, that should stop going forward. Also, it makes you wonder if local businesses will be receiving calls from Google’s Duplex or other systems in the future or not. It seems not? And if not, why has Google been quiet about this announcement?
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About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.
