India election: Google stops working properly hours before results declared, angering voters searching for latest news

'It is scary.. hope this get sorted soon'

An Indian labourer carries the sound speakers ahead of preprations for the election vote counting process in Bangalore, India ( EPA/JAGADEESH NV)

Google has stopped working properly, just hours before India announces the results of its election.

During an election period that has already been rife with misinformation and confusion, the search engine has stopped showing the latest results when users search.

The search engine is having problems indexing websites, it said. That means the results that show up when anyone searches for something are likely to be old, since new content is not appearing in its catalogue.

"We're currently experiencing indexing issues that may cause stale search results in some cases," the Google Webmaster account wrote on Twitter.

The company promised to send out more information when there were any further updates on the issue. But nothing more had been posted at the time of publication.

The tweet and the problems it described with met with outrage from Indian citizens who said they were being kept from finding the latest news on the election.

"Damn, we have elections result tomorrow in India!!" one reply read, alongside a host of sad emoji. "It is scary.. hope this get sorted soon.."

Exit polls have shown that India's ruling coalition will retain power after results are declared on Thursday. They showed an outright majority for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's alliance in the seven-phase election that ended on Sunday.

But such surveys have proved misleading before, and the main opposition Congress party on Wednesday dismissed them as fake. It was just the latest confusion in an election period marked by misinformation and false reports, both online and off.