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.
I’ve never had a Twitter account. I’ve never wanted one or needed one to be honest. I do feel like the easiest way to make yourself irrelevant is to gate keep yourself and allow a competitor to just copy your entire platform which appears to be what’s happening.
I had, have, one a decade or more ago and then forgot the password to both it and the email address associated. Never really felt the need to re- engage.
While I understand the value that (once?) existed, I also am happy to see this self-immolation. I was troubled by the lazy reporting, that was becoming so common, of people simply reporting on tweets and responses to them, with no analysis outside of said reactions. But you could fill screen inches with all those links.