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.

  • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • danc4498@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

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

      • Instigate@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • bingbong@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

    • coffeetest@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Pseu@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        If I were making a web crawler, I would make it so that if a crawler finds a domain that appears to have changed dramatically or gone offline it will re-crawl the domain and flag already-crawled pages as potentially obsolete.

  • Tygr@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

        • EuphoricPenguin@normalcity.life
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          1 year ago

          The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.

        • damnYouSun@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I mean there’s admiring a ruthless mob boss - and then there is admiring a petty thief that keeps getting arrested and all his plans blow up in this face.

          Spez is losing his tiny mind.

      • YellowtoOrange@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Oh, there’s scope to introduce “official” Reddit user badges for 10 bucks a pop and all of sorts of suicidal Musk shenanigans

  • assembly@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • WimpyWoodchuck@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      This sounds a lot like Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

      Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn’t it much more likely that they’re just … disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.

      • jochem@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I also seriously doubt there’s a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves.

        Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he’ll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.

        • frumpyfries@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Normally I would tend to agree with you, but look where Musk got his “loans” to buy out Twitter. Saudi Arabia and Russia where big “lenders”.

      • agoramachina@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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…

      • Deez@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard of that expression or phenomenon.

  • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

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

    • Knightfox@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Once upon a time Quora had reasonably accessible information. Now I find it nearly unusable and only go there as a last desperate effort which is generally fruitless. Pinterest is annoying, but generally you can still view some content. What’s annoying is trying to download, copy, or isolate content there. If all you want to do is view an image, Google can typically still pull the image out and make it viewable from the search. The problem only arises if you try to go in and see the original.

  • irkli@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    And this is interesting…
    https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110657916419002616

    "rodhilton Rod Hilton @rodhilton@mastodon.social I have some insider knowledge here that I wanted to share.

    This is not happening because Google scrapes Twitter and is now unable to. Google has been a paying customer (with a special negotiated rate) of the Firehose API for nearly a decade. Presumably, that deal was still in effect, barring API rate changes having an impact.

    So this decision is solely because the results can no longer be viewed by non-logged-in users.

    https://universeodon.com/@TomWellborn/

    • Obinice@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, if the content is walled off from the public, there’s not much point indexing it

      It’s a shame it’s come to this, but there are literal crazy people at the helm over at Twitter…

        • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Would that fit with his own head cannon though?

          Elon has been a destroyer behind closed doors it’s sounds like, tough to say if it was just due to how pompous and narcissistic he is or if it was deliberate retaliation for being a whiny little spoiled brat.

  • Knusper@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • PhoenxBlue@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Can someone please ELI5 what his end game is? I refuse to pay attention to twitter, but Elon, he’s crazy.

    • DevCat@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Maul535@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    One of my coworkers absolutely loves Musk and I can’t understand why… The guy’s a joke. I feel like people think Musk is smart just because he’s eccentric and has money, I hope eventually everyone comes to see just how normally intelligent he actually is

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I have a friend who defended Musk when I called him (Musk) an asshole. I choose not to bring up anything related to Musk to protect the friendship. Same friend has been showing other signs that he’s being pulled to the far-right. Makes me sad.

      • metallic_substance@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        All it takes is a lack of critical thinking skills to get headed down that road. I’ve seen a few family and friends get sucked into the far right ideology, but they were already not so bright people to begin with

  • Pissy Badger@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    That post image.

    Is it just me, or is Elon looking more and more like a movie villain as time goes by?

    • Instigate@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      I keep seeing it used for media articles because it’s fucking perfect and accurately displays his disdain for the poors. The fact that anyone with less than a billion dollars in net value thinks he cares about them is both baffling and hilarious.

      • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        his disdain for the poors.

        Correction: his disdain for everyone who isn’t himself. He doesn’t even treat his own kids well. His trans daughter changed her name to not be associated with him.

        • Instigate@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          But he’ll gladly suck some Saudi dick if it marginally increases his net value.

          Side note; I’m so glad that one of his daughters is trans because it helped expose him for the absolute fucking bigot he is. I stopped being a fanboy after the whole ‘pedo guy’ incident, and it’s been nice to have people finally come to the same realisation I’ve had and apologise for trying to defend him back then.