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.
If your company cares about it’s SEO rankings, you don’t make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.
Not even a month later and said company rebranded itself without checking trademarks. Now we have “X”, a brand that non only risks infringement of quite a few registered eu-trademarks but didn’t even apply for an own eu-trademark…
Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.
Elongated Muskrat 🤣
deleted by creator
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?
No it’s just one guy called Dev.
And he’s on a H1B visa and can’t leave.
Dude was just a marketing intern and is mad stressed and knows he’s in WAY over his head now.
Fake it 'till you make it.
Or the multibillion dollar company collapses into a heaping, flaming pile of slag as a result of your actions. One or the other.
It’s a win/win
They screwed up his name tag, because reasons.
His name is actually Dave. But there aren’t any other Dave’s working there anymore so he is ok with being called Dev.
Deb on the other hand is pretty pissed off.
Or maybe it’s this guy, Dev from a canadian tv show called The Listener. They called the hacker ‘Dev’, I’m assuming it’s on purpose.
https://thelistener.fandom.com/wiki/Dev_Clark
Please kindly accept my upvote - made my day!
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.
That’s a big yikes and I hope they will find another way…
Coercing workers built America! They can’t leave… because of the implication.
Are you gonna hurt these workers?
Yeah, he lives in the break room on a cot.
Twitter still has devs?
Twitter’s dev(s)
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.
Honestly, as long as Twitter is triggering libtards, I’m down with it
Twitter’s not triggering anyone because they couldn’t afford their libtard triggering bill; apparently conservatives are bad at running businesses.
My urge to eat a liberal amount popcorn has been triggered a lot by twitter’s slow motion train wreck.
Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they’reat it.
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
I don’t think Twitter would rate limit the Google indexer, though.
It’s probably the increased bounce rate, as people click Twitter links in the search results, get Twitter’s login wall and click back to continue searching instead of creating an account.
I tried to access twitter by impersonating a googlebot. I was denied. The bots aren’t so much rate limited, but unable to access tweets as they don’t have a Twitter account.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Not fully. You can still see NSFW posts without logging in on old reddit after simple “Yes, I’m over 18” prompt. For now only the new design forces login.
but isn’t there no ad revenue on NSFW subs? I thought I read that
I’m down, Spez. What’s bad for Reddit is good for us.
Honestly… We’re all (or a massive chunk of us are) Reddit refugees. I don’t give many fucks about that place. If it thrives, whatever. It’s out of my control. I’m not going to hate post here with fantasies of spez seeing it and being like, “WHYYYYY?”
What little I’ve seen here seems like a disproportionate amount of passionate and quality users came over here. Users that were likely a bit more than casual; ie we we invested enough to use 3rd party clients, some of us are probably former mods who got disillusioned, etc.
We’re all giddy and it is the honeymoon phase and I HOPE HOPE HOPE the users’ enthusiasm doesn’t fizzle like Mastodon seems to but I would say, just use this. Enjoy it. Post worthwhile things. I don’t think Reddit is necessarily going away, but if it’s just some weird bot riddled, low effort posts sort of place, why would we want to be there anyway?
The fediverse will probably last as long as the internet does, if the BBS is anything to go by. And I’ve seen people starting to realize federation is an actually decent option at the very least.
I saw people unironically saying this and being upvoted for it in hackernews, completely turned me off from the site lol
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.
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.
I think it’s even stupider than that. Spez didn’t realize he pissed off the Apollo dev, and the shock of that first Apollo post made him ashamed and angry. He’s kept a lot of vitriol aimed at the Apollo dev. Spez fucked reddit because he got mad.
That was just the tipping point. Reddit has been in a decline for a few years but we were all like frogs in boiling water but we accepted it because we didn’t know where else to go. RIF shutting down forced my hand and now I’m here. Hopefully to stay.
And for the better too. People will come to realize that there are better ways to socialize on the internet.
I can’t believe how fast the fediverse is growing thanks to both reddit and Twitter simultaneously imploding. I honestly welcome it, despite the growing pains this feels more like early 2000s reddit than the modern version ever did.
Can’t wait for genZ to welcome the return of spaces that aren’t optimized for monetization over communication first.
As someone who spent the last 13 years browsing reddit almost entirely with RIF, if it hadn’t been for third party services I’d have left when they added awards.
Now we need to do the same thing with YouTube and Twitch
That would be nice, but is at a whole other scale with bandwidth and storage space.
Although there is a fediverse alternative for Video Hosting: https://joinpeertube.org/
Are there any for video/voice chat similar to discord? I feel like there are split opinions on it as a platform as they’ve made so many changes with community servers, plus their early association to Charlottesville obviously leaves concerns…but there’s definitely tons of wholesome groups where I’ve made life-long friends. I love that it’s remained ad free but don’t see that lasting
There is https://matrix.org/ but the video/voice isn’t as nice as discord.
Great. Do Pinterest next.
Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I’m sure we’re all cowering at his superior intellect.
Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.
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.
I have never heard a more perfect description of Elon Musk.
Michael Scott’s heart can be in the right place, Musk is straight cruel.
Did we see the same show? Micheal Scott is incredibly cruel all the time and his heart is rarely in the right place lol
Literally all you need is enough money and you can pay smart people to do impressive things, while taking all the credit.
SpaceX has a lot to benefit from the fact that a lot of people love the idea of working with rockets but the actual job market was very limited with places like NASA only taking the best of the best. Which doesn’t mean SpaceX has subpar engineers and scientists, humanity just has a lot more to offer than NASA and other smaller space agencies could afford to employ.
It’s absolutely beyond me why these idiots don’t pay people to think of clever things and discourage dumb things.
Imagine having your own “think tank”, it works be like living life on cheat mode.
Smart rich people have advisors they listen to.
Rich people who are too “smart” to listen to advice have sycophants.
This. This baffles me. How he was able to run a company which makes rockets which shuttles between earth and outerspace?
I read a quote somewhere from a former Space X engineer that they basically had to create a system to manage Musk and his fragile ego so that they can function normally without Musk getting in the way.
So basically, Gwynne Shotwell is the one actually calling the day-to-day shots, and happens to be a good Elon-whisperer.
I wonder if other companies, particularly VC-funded ones, have staff dedicated to “managing” the crazy person with the checkbook…
Short answer: he didn’t.
He didn’t create SpaceX, he bought it.
deleted by creator
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.
This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair
Oh I bet the actual employees are painfully aware. But the lack of funding and government red tape? That’s the real failure.
I’m always totally surprised how willfully European governments have put so much power into the hands of Twitter. Nearly every organization and politician has a Twitter account to be used for official and semi-official communication. And Twitter isn’t and was never really very popular in Europe compared to Facebook and other social networks, which these same organizations and politicians demonized to the max. I hope this is a wake up call: there are no inherently good centralized and commercialized social networks fit for communicating important information to an audience of potentially everyone.
Yeah, I’m still baffled by the fact that all these officials are still on Twitter.
Yeah. Moronic to use Twitter for anything even remotely important like emergency alerts
I disagree.
Twitter was one of the largest social media platforms on the planet, and was especially huge in the US. Before Musk bought it it didn’t show any signs of failure. It lasted over a decade, and had enough reach that I think it made a lot of sense for things like emergency alerts, government officials, etc. to use it as one means, even a main means, of disseminating information. It was really effective at that until what, a year ago?
I don’t think anyone really predicted Elon Musk buying Twitter and running it into the ground within a year. Yes, it was hypothetically possible in our capitalist system, but there was no indication that it would until Elon made a joking tweet.
Because of how the modern internet has organized itself, it was inevitable that critical systems would utilize Twitter for it’s reach.
I think you’re applying hindsight and expecting people to have made decisions based on events that hadn’t happened yet. Before musk bought Twitter it wasn’t at all unreasonable for people to rely on it for information from government officials because it was the format millions of people were accustomed to receiving that information in every day.
Well then since this is hindsight then I hope everyone is learning now that we shouldn’t be relying on single corporate entities to deliver our emergency notifications.
“Retrospectively, it was a bad idea” makes more sense.
It’s like this. Ambulance use the road even if the the hospitals didn’t build it. Now imagine, twitter is the road.
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.
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 !alerts@california.gov and a !earthquakes@california.gov 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.
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It’s quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.
Fine by me. I never saw any value in it, even well before Musk took over. The character limit is guaranteed to eliminate any nuance, and the interface makes it incredibly difficult to follow what discussion there is.
I think originally when Twitter was created, the idea was that it would also be accessible via SMS and so the limit was imposed in order to allow a a tweet to fit into one SMS message.
We’ve had Twitter since SMS cost per-message on most plans.
It was great for following breaking news and not much else.
I think it’s more along the lines of:
Musk: You can’t see tweets unless you’re logged in.
Google: Challenge accepted.
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
This was only a problem because of improper centralization in the first place. From that perspective, this is the Internet self-correcting a defect.
Yes, but it will suck in the meanwhile. People expect these links to last. But instead a huge amount of content will no longer be reachable.
Was already pretty shit with embeds, now it’s just shit all around
Now do Quora.
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?
All signing up for Quora gets you is email roundups that keep coming no matter how many times you unsubscribe.
I finally managed to unsubscribe to that crap. Took me forever!
I haven’t gotten any in a while but I’m up to 9 Quora email addresses in my block list.
This became bad enough at my job (I’m a school sysadmin) that I blocked quora.com in our spam filter…students had a habit of signing up for it and like you said, it’s damn near impossible to unsubscribe, let alone show 200+ kids how to unsubscribe.
There was a time quora was genuinely interesting/useful as an a2a site for all your ‘expert opinion’ questions. Now it’s just another social media
And Pinterest. I want my quality searches back.
Use google and add “site:Pinterest.com” then search by images. Works better than Pinterest. Also works for Poshmark.
Good advice except you forgot the minus symbol, this tip will ONLY get Pinterest links.
I think the point is to NOT have pinterest spam your search results that you cannot see without an account.
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.
Note that Google allows plenty of login gated content which is actually against their indexing terms.
The key is not to force it for every viewer or give a few view credits. The fact that Mollusk gang doesn’t know this is very reflective of their current capabilities. There’s no real talent left at Twitter.
Could also be realted to not paying the bills google sent him.
people really need to get over this nonsense. yeah, twitter wasn’t paying their bills. but now they have paid it. it was just for some internal analytics services, not the main site, and had nothing to do with twitter’s recent downtime.
google’s not going to retaliate against them after they paid.
In general: cloud provider’s marginal costs for continue to host something while a customer doesn’t pay is negligible. Keeping it running while incurring more receivables, or blocking access while making it clear there is an easy way to reclaim data and functionality, are immensely more profitable. Nothing to “retaliate” really.
I really hope google spammed musk’s phone with calls about the outstanding balance.
The reality is that this guy leading the company is refusing to pays bills for other services like he is on a bankruptcy spree. So not surprising that people don’t get over his ‘he paid it on this one item, so stop’.
Just because he orderer a massive dinner, and finally paid for the drinks, does not make that guy a person of illl repute.
Broken people breaking things.
Throw money around recklessly, regard your broken self as some great lord of a realm, treat people as your slaves, then fiddle with little pet peeves in utter ignorance of how and why they work, watch a cascade effect spiral out of control, blame anyone and everyone but yourself.
This is a right-wing pattern. Look at the orange cock holster and the bullshit he was fixated on while squatting in the White House. The mind of a petulant child.
Musk is moving on to the FO part of FAFO.
Very good. An evil corporation doing evil things to an evil agenda.
