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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 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.

drathvedro ,

Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they'reat it.

Cras ,

I have a chrome plugin to strip any Pinterest results from searches, it's the absolute worst

Tygr ,

Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.

Ruorc ,

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.

gedaliyah ,
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

This is exactly why we should be encouraging local libraries, universities, law enforcement, city, and county governments how to set up Mastodon servers.

On the one hand, when you have a duty to inform the public, it no longer makes sense to suffer at the whims of tech billionaires. There was a time, for a decade or two, when these sites prioritized access and predictability, but no more. When you have information that you need to have accessible, the only guarantee is to control it yourself. They can still use corporate social media to get the message out to their network, but link it back to their mastodon account. Roll it into their IT departments just like their email server.

On the other hand, it's a critical step for the success of the fediverse. Universal email adoption came about because it was used by government and universities. What you could call the original social network is still an open protocol, it's not owned by any single corporation or government, and still the primary form of communication online. About 2 billion emails have been sent since you started reading this.

assembly ,

Doesn’t 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 that’s what they will index. Google isn’t 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.

VanillaGorilla ,

God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.

detwaft ,

I’m only an amateur but I’m happy to give it a go

AlmightySnoo ,
@AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world avatar

Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it's just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn't exist anymore. Google certainly didn't "retaliate", bots simply couldn't find those pages anymore.

bingbong ,

The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of self-owns. Apart from the stress it must put on their devs, it's been entertaining

daikiki ,

They have more than one dev left?

marswarrior ,
@marswarrior@lemmy.world avatar

No it's just one guy called Dev.

paper_clip ,
@paper_clip@kbin.social avatar

And he's on a H1B visa and can't leave.

coffeetest ,

Crawl issues I am sure but also user experience issues. Google is sensitive to sending visitors to sites where metrics indicate users do not, like bounce rates etc. I don't use twt but if it is the case you have the be logged in to see anything now, a non-logged in user will click a link from Google hit a login page, and use the back button. I would assume Google will see that as a bad search result and use it less.

danc4498 ,

The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.

BrainisfineIthink ,
@BrainisfineIthink@lemmy.one avatar

This is correct.

Instigate ,

Yeah, that's a pretty easy and reasonable conclusion to come to if you think about if for more than five seconds. I'm not sure Elon has any toes left after he keeps shooting himself in the feet.

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