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.
This is correct.
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.
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
Twitter still has devs?
They have more than one dev left?
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.
The word bots triggers the muskrat.
I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.
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.
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?
Spez already said he admires how Elon is running Twitter.
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.
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.
Oh, there’s scope to introduce “official” Reddit user badges for 10 bucks a pop and all of sorts of suicidal Musk shenanigans
Wait until you have to be logged in to read any posts on Reddit.
Didn't we achieve this by turning all subreddit NSFW?
Yes, but when the users and mods who built the site do it, it's petty and selfish. When the ceo does it, it's brilliant, compounds user value, and improves the security of the user experience. /s
Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they’reat it.
Please remove Quora links…
Every time I click a Quora link it takes me to a completely unrelated question to the one I clicked on.
I swear that site is doing this deliberately to make it seem like it has more traffic than it does.
You can omit search results from certain sites by adding -quora.com to your search if you’re feelings motivated
This functionality is currently broken on DDG and was broken on Google about one year ago. Search engines as a whole need complete overhauling
Is there a way to just add that flag to all of my searches? Quora is shit in general
I don’t know of a way to save it as a setting but there may be a plugin you could add to your browser
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.
Yeah, Quora was somewhat decent, but now they force this arbitrary “All related” sort as the default setting for presenting answers and it shows answers for different questions which is nonsense. I’m looking for an answer specific to one question, so don’t show me stuff that appears somewhat related…
Pinterest in search results is totally cringy, but by itself it’s a very good place to find images you need and has very cool recommendation algorithms.
I have a chrome plugin to strip any Pinterest results from searches, it's the absolute worst
What did pinterest do? Isn’t it just a bunch os pictures put together?
some cases with pinterest result is absolute garbage and might as well better to search on search engine image instead
Can I please get this guy’s face off my front page? ._.
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
a part of me wants this to get worse so that people finally realize elon is insane once and for all
People with power shouldn’t be allowed any control over platforms that give power to “the people”. I believe this is all intentional. If it was just Twitter, or just Reddit, or just 1 TV network, I wouldn’t think that but they’re sabotaging all the mainstream platforms at once and making it incredibly obvious. They’re trying to collapse our means of communication ahead of 2024.
There’s no way to prove or disprove this idea
Is that a Jimmy Hoffa quote? It’s not even true. If recordings popped up of them saying the quite part out loud, wouldn’t that be proof? There’s no hard evidence for a lot of ideas that are clearly true and should influence peoples decisions going forward. If we didn’t do that, we’d all be dead at the hands of people that think that line absolves them from any accountability from anyone. Terrible people aren’t dumb, they know what they shouldn’t say out loud, and they know what to say when their actions expose the truth, doesn’t mean we all have to keep them in our lives until they’re proven shitty in a court of law, that’s how domestic murder victims get made.
I don’t know who that is, but that idea comes from creating testable hypothesis.
shirley this has nothing to do with the massive outstanding bill twitter owes to google cloud
It could be something like that. And stop calling me Shirley.
deleted by creator
Great now can they remove Pinterest too please??
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.
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…
I’m convinced that Elon is intentionally killing the platform.
He ain’t that smart
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.
To be fair I have never found any useful information on Twitter from Google search results.
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.
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.
Beautiful analogy.
I can so relate to this, and it honestly does make perfect sense.
When I was 8, I took a hacksaw to my cousins bike and ripped it in half. My plan was to make a unicycle… I only made people upset.
This pretty much sums it up for twitter I guess. Thank god we have fediverse (at least for those savvy enough) to partake in
He does not have one. He’s just high on whatever it is he’s taking.
Hubris?
Debris
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.
Great. Do Pinterest next.
And Tiktok. And Quora.
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?
Gotta have someone to push off the glass cliff
Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard of that expression or phenomenon.
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…
Elon’s goal is to destroy twitter, per his wife.
In that case let’s thank him for spending few billions doing that! Thank you Elon :p
You’re gonna have to be more specific. Which wife?
Wait what
Probably some sort of rich person scheme that he can do whereby if his multi-billion dollar mistake ends up being a failure he can write it off and no longer be on the hook for it or something.
Like bankruptcy, but only for twitter and not himself.
He can’t write off 44 billion though, he would get a tiny fraction of that and there are debts to pay back to investors.
You can’t just say write off and expect anything to happen
I don’t think he’s interested ingetting it back, just to no longer be on the hook for it. I’m sure there’s no doubt various loopholes that he can use to wiggle out of the full consequences of his stupidity and hubris.
So when you do a write off you still are responsible for that money. It’s not declaring bankruptcy, it’s just lowering your taxable income due to loss. So “write-off” doesn’t really make much sense in this context.
Maybe not the correct ‘legal’ term. But it’s splitting hairs really.
He wants rid of his serious burden. And imagine he thinks that he can do that if he kills the platform. Instead of being on the hook for 44billion with the repayments and interest attributed to that every month, he can cut that down to a fraction.
I’m not saying I have any idea how it works, or even if it’s possible. Mainly that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.
Buying Twitter and tanking it lets him write off a huge amount of money for 2023 and get his taxes back from the previous year.
Also he gets to leverage Tesla stock as the company is growing more fiscally viable… Why does that matter? Why sell before it takes off??
Elon bought Twitter with $12.5bn in loans… Secured with the same value of Tesla stock. He didn’t sell it…
So it’s almost free money. If the stock takes off he can make out like a bandit, pay the loan off with 1/2 the value of the real stock once it rises, but despite making money can still claim an overall loss on Twitter…
This is why he doesn’t give a fark if Twitter lives or dies. If Twitter dies it’s a write off, but because half the investment is literally a loan against Tesla stock he still treats it like free money…
There’s a cap on loss deductions, billionaires don’t care about deducting losses. Also he didn’t buy it with Tesla stock, he put up Tesla stock as collateral.
Right…stock as collateral in a loan.
It’s amazing what bullshit Billionaires can do.
Also those losses are per corporate entity so he gets to use those caps multiple times on each corporation and on himself.
is there a human behind such decisions or is it just an automated algorithm?
Well, at the very least, there’s humans constantly tweaking that algorithm, whether it’s for fine-tuning search results or just making SEO less useful.
