Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets
Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets
Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter's links from its search results after the social network's owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users...
Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter's links from its search results after the social network's owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.
Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.
According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.
"For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky," Schwartz wrote.
Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.
Doesnât sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then thatâs what they will index. Google isnât a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren't readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can't see it unless you log in. Most people aren't going to create an account just to do that.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
Mind you this is not Google doing it on purpose. This is just Musk's genius idea of blocking tweets without being logged in. Others will drop as well, they just need some time to expire. Also, if you are wondering if they can show tweets to crawler but not show it to others Google doesn't look favorably on that. Content must appear the same to crawler as well as humans.
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It's quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.
Musk is moving on to the FO part of FAFO.
Between the garbage fire that is Twitter and the soulless corporate greed of Reddit, there couldn't be a better time for people to explore federated alternatives. These social media giants think they're going to generate more profit by these moves, but they're setting themselves up to go the way of MySpace.
"Google decimates Twitter search results" makes it sound like it's something Google did intentionally, rather than a simple refresh of Google's cache, now that they can't spider their way through Twitter's network.
In other words, it's Twitter that did this, not Google.
I don't support either in particular, but this shouldn't be immediately assumed as retaliation.
Can I please get this guy's face off my front page? ._.
This is such a great example of the potential consequences of making a decision without understanding the landscape/context. It's obvious this would happen in hindsight.
People with power shouldn't be allowed any control over platforms that give power to "the people". I believe this is all intentional. If it was just Twitter, or just Reddit, or just 1 TV network, I wouldn't think that but they're sabotaging all the mainstream platforms at once and making it incredibly obvious. They're trying to collapse our means of communication ahead of 2024.
Doesnât sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then thatâs what they will index. Google isnât a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
Musky is probably wondering how to charge search engines indexing his site for free
I'm enjoying watching Twitter go up in flames in real time. đż
a part of me wants this to get worse so that people finally realize elon is insane once and for all
Google didn't do anything, musk is the one who made them disappear to googles bots.
I guess that's what happens when you don't pay your hosting fees.
Imagine the mailbox getting all the âthere are unresolved Mobile Usability issues with your site Twitter.comâ and ânew page indexing issues discoveredâ from Google Search Console Team
This morning, I needed to use image search for a bit and basically 4/5 links leading to Twitter wouldn't load for various reasons. That was not on Google, but I imagine, they have (had) similar problems.
Well, and for normal search, Twitter results are completely worthless to me, as I don't have an account. So, at this rate, no results from Twitter would be the optimum.
"ding dong the bird is dead!"
that's it folks!
Doesnât sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then thatâs what they will index. Google isnât a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
Maybe they could allow some of the text to show in order for spiders to index the tweets correctly, something like the first 280 characters could work.
I am genuinely curious. What's the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
Not entirely related, but I wonder how things like Lemmy/mastodon/other fediverse things compare to Reddit/twitter in terms of search engine indexing. Would posts like this even be indexed? Since posts are accessible through many instances would it be indexed multiple times? Would this affect ranking?
Has anyone noticed too that if you put AI Blockers on your website Google delists it from their search?
Who would have thought
Very good. An evil corporation doing evil things to an evil agenda.
I am genuinely curious. What's the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
Permanently Deleted
So, in addition to the "haha lol get fucked Elon", it simultaneously feels a little shady for Google to immediately do this immediately after payment stops. Not saying it's a direct retaliation but it's a bad look all the same. There are a lot of sites that do shit exactly like what Musk is doing to Twitter, and they get put in results all the time. I've had to use add-ons to de-pintreat my results.
And just for the record, Elon musk is a dangerous idiot and he needs brought down in the most extravagant way possible. I'm not bringing this up in defense of his bullshit.
Obviously, this is political and dangerous, and Musk should send a letter to HQ telling them to, well, go to sleep and just not wake up. Google knows exactly what they're doing. We already know Google has blacklisted Truth and Rumble, and other sites it doesn't like, and they're about to do it to Twitter. They didn't do this to Reddit when it went private. Also, if you don't believe me, use Bing and search for Truth and Rumble and everything is correctly indexed, then look at Google, and it doesn't index hardly anything.
I've been saying for a while now that Google is one of the most dangerous companies in the world, and one of the most partisan if anything.
If you think I'm being dramatic, just look at some leaked footage to understand how this company operates. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6162889/Leaked-Google-conference-video-shows-founder-comparing-Trump-voters-extremists.html
I won't even mention their news tab, advertising business, insanely biased search results or anything like that, but google in its entirety is an insanely dangerous company that takes action based on their political beliefs, and because of the scale of Twitter and Google, it's definitely discrimination and shouldn't be tolerated. I'm just happy that Google is getting less popular every day.
