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Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets (www.rawstory.com)

submitted 1 year ago by DevCat@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[+] irkli@lemmy.world 75 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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[-] obinice@lemmy.world 32 points 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...

[-] widowhanzo@lemmy.fmhy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

To be fair I have never found any useful information on Twitter from Google search results.

[-] Zithero@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I'm convinced that Elon is intentionally killing the platform.

[-] Alivrah@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

He ain’t that smart

[-] stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 1 points 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.

[-] Shikadi@wirebase.org 15 points 1 year ago

Great now can they remove Pinterest too please??

[-] MimicJar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

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

Glad to see (semi) confirmation of this. It's the same reason paywall news sites are magically not paywalled (or less paywalled) when coming from a Google search. If you're showing Google something different than what you're showing users, Google is going to remove or down rank your results.

What makes this more "news-worthy" is that Google and Twitter have had a great relationship for many years and Twitter is typically among the top results (for some topics). Obviously Musk has been destroying that relationship over the past year.

[-] minnow@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Makes a ton of sense. It only makes Google look bad when their users can't actually view the results of their search. Imagine if the first page of a Google search was nothing but limited access stuff (paywalls, members only, etc) it would drive users to the competition really fast.

this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023

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