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.
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.
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.
Heck i couldn’t easily check if diablo 4 servers were wonky because I can’t check the blizzard Twitter. Obviously this is less important than an amber alert. As another reply said, I think police need a better way to disseminate emergency information and that is on them. However something like server status is a perfect use of Twitter that is now close enough to impossible to do. If public agencies are going to continue using Twitter for these purposes, then something needs to change. Personally I’d be ok with the government having a little more say in things if we are going to continue viewing Twitter as a public service.
Alternatively, it’s probably better long-term if those functions become replaced with official Mastodon instances that are for official announcements only.
eg If there were a California.Gov Mastodon instance with a [email protected] and a [email protected] then everyone in that area could just sub to those communities and if there was something to announce it could go out via those. Of course that presupposes that enough people are in the Fediverse for it to be a good platform to share that info but structurally it’s probably far better than letting a third party commercial interest host these things.
I haven’t looked at Mastodon at all yet so I don’t really know how it works, but from what I have gathered, it is not dissimilar from lemmy but for microblogs. I suppose the main similarity is its distributed network which I agree is a better solution than a centralized server. Hopefully that statement ages well.
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.
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.
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
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.
I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.
Elongated Muskrat 🤣
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.
Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they’reat it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
