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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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[-] Tygr@lemmy.world 240 points 1 year ago

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

[-] EuphoricPenguin22@normalcity.life 107 points 1 year ago

Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?

[-] divingaround@mander.xyz 84 points 1 year ago

Spez already said he admires how Elon is running Twitter.

[-] EuphoricPenguin22@normalcity.life 40 points 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.

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[-] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 157 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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 146 points 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.

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[-] bingbong@lemmy.world 43 points 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

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[-] coffeetest@kbin.social 32 points 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.

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[-] drathvedro@lemm.ee 122 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] TicklishRocket@lemmy.world 120 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] riodoro1@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago

At this point I’m half convinced spez was such an asshole to Reddits users because of how the community turned on his idol elon. I remember not longer than two years ago Reddit was basically musk circlejerk but this genius fucked up even that.

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[-] Idefinitelydonotknow@lemmy.world 119 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] gerowen@lemmy.world 66 points 1 year ago

She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.

[-] whatsarefoogee@lemmy.world 48 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Nikls94@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago

I think it’s called a ”Fucker-Upper“

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[-] agoramachina@sh.itjust.works 30 points 1 year ago

Gotta have someone to push off the glass cliff

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[-] niktemadur@lemmy.world 103 points 1 year ago

You've heard of a "walled garden".
But this... this has become a "walled right-wing dumpster".

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[-] Ruorc@lemmy.world 101 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] CthulhuOnIce@lemmy.fmhy.ml 97 points 1 year ago

This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair

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[-] morrowind@lemmy.ml 33 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Snapz@lemmy.world 97 points 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.

[-] Dash11@lemmy.world 90 points 1 year ago

I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.

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[-] WimpyWoodchuck@feddit.de 44 points 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.

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[-] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 85 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] IlllIIIlllIlllI@programming.dev 81 points 1 year ago
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[-] Landmammals@lemmy.world 76 points 1 year ago
[-] kat@lemmy.world 56 points 1 year ago

Quora has to be one of the most useless, misdirecting "resources" out there. No idea how much of this changes once you make an account, but every single question is filled up with ads and other people's responses to other questions. It looks so confusing and messy. Who would want to sign up for a site that seems so disjointed?

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[-] Matdan@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

And Pinterest. I want my quality searches back.

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[-] darkevilmac@vlemmy.net 74 points 1 year ago

I feel like Google is going to have to find a way to effectively index federated content at some point. The only way to really get human information is from sites like Reddit and Twitter. And both of those platforms seem to be dedicated to completely imploding at the moment.

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[-] irkli@lemmy.world 66 points 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 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...

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[-] assembly@lemmy.world 62 points 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.

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[-] graphite@lemmy.world 61 points 1 year ago

decimates

Twitter absolutely DESTROYED by RATE LIMITING and ELON

[-] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 45 points 1 year ago

Um actually 🤓 decimating it would be 47 million links 🤓 not 227 million

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[-] Kriv@lemmy.world 47 points 1 year ago

Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I'm sure we're all cowering at his superior intellect.

[-] redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com 50 points 1 year ago

Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.

[-] jecxjo@midwest.social 36 points 1 year ago

That is literally the complaint from ex-employees of his companies. He is Tony Stark meets Michael Scott. So much money it compensates for sheer stupidity.

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[-] Antaeus@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

Very good. An evil corporation doing evil things to an evil agenda.

[-] MSids 46 points 1 year ago

I mean, is it evil? Seems like removing results that can't be seen without a login might make sense. Google has plenty of faults but I don't know if this is one of them

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[-] Binderfullofpizza@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago

So much for that ad revenue

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[-] Pissy_Badger@pawb.social 38 points 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?

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[-] chmod744username@lemmy.world 33 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] PhoenxBlue@lemmy.ca 32 points 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.world 77 points 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.

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[-] IgotGrapes@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago

Elon's goal is to destroy twitter, per his wife.

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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
1962 points (98.0% liked)

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