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.
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.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
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
They have more than one dev left?
My understanding is there’s group of people whose visa is sponsored by Twitter. If they leave the company, they may well have to leave the country.
No it’s just one guy called Dev.
And he’s on a H1B visa and can’t leave.
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.
I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.
The word bots triggers the muskrat.
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
I saw people unironically saying this and being upvoted for it in hackernews, completely turned me off from the site lol
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.
God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.
I’m only an amateur but I’m happy to give it a go
Has anyone noticed too that if you put AI Blockers on your website Google delists it from their search?
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?
Ever heard of the glass cliff? You might even see a name or two on that list that you recognize.
Yup, I remember the absolute outrage when Ellen Pao became CEO of reddit, though it is nice at least to finally see her vindicated on there now. I hadn’t heard of the glass cliff until long after she left, but people have been referencing it left and right on reddit recently. Turns out, Ellen Pao wasn’t the problem…
Yeah that’s crazy, I was furious when they fired Victoria back in the day. It’s nice to see that Alexis Ohanian is the one who deserves the blame for that massive fuckup. Man that gives me a pang of nostalgia for the old days of reddit though. Interesting that the Wiki article points to Obama’s presidency and the 08 financial collapse as a “glass cliff” event.
She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.
Musk is a manchild who can’t handle being told “no”, so that’s a given.
But it’s smart of her to put that out in advance. It informs Musk that she will stay out of his way, and she doesn’t have to take the blame for idiotic decisions made by him.
I think it’s called a ”Fucker-Upper“
Someone needs to make this Musk’s official title. Chief-Fuck-Upper. I also heard Chief-Twit circling around.
Can we perhaps add a list of notable titles to his Wikipedia entry?
“CFU of Twitter” does have a nice ring to it
Then Spez could be CFU of Reddit. I kinda miss Ellen Pao. And Chooter.
Edit: A word.
Both Musk and Huffman seem to think the E in CEO stands for “Enshittification.”
Edit - typo
Gotta have someone to push off the glass cliff
Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard of that expression or phenomenon.
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.
I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.
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.
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.
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.
I hope this results in companies no longer using Twitter for their communications. It’s completely inappropriate.
I’ve missed two trains and had to take and Uber until I recently found the only place the train company reliably posts updates was Twitter, over their own damn website.
Using twitter for any kind of emergency communication is a very bad idea in the first place.
Twitter is doing everyone a favor by demonstrating exactly why that is.
Can someone please ELI5 what his end game is? I refuse to pay attention to twitter, but Elon, he’s crazy.
You are assuming he has one. Before he overpaid for Twitter, he probably thought he would turn it into a successful version of TruthSocial. Then reality came knocking. Now, he may have no idea what he’s going to do.
When you were a kid, did you ever take apart an old vacuum cleaner or power tool, thinking “I’m going to make something great out of this”? Then, when you had all the pieces lying around you, you wondered why you even started because you have no idea what you are going to do now? That may be Elon at the moment. He’s looking at the parts of his mom’s treasured vacuum cleaner, and wondering how he can blame it on the brother his parents never gave him.
Ah, that’s gonna sting. Google is still most people’s gateway to finding stuff.
Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they’reat it.
It’s funny how Spez idolizes a guy who doesn’t pay his bills. It’s also funny watching the hate pplatform Twitter get absolutely destroyed by its owner. The internet in 2023 is a wild and crazily changing place.
You’ve heard of a “walled garden”.
But this… this has become a “walled right-wing dumpster”.A “walled swamp”,
What’s there not to like?!
They’ve always wanted to build a wall. Hopefully they wall themselves off from the rest of the world.
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.
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.
