this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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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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[–] Binderfullofpizza@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So much for that ad revenue

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[–] IgotGrapes@lemmy.world 33 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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

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[–] PhoenxBlue@lemmy.ca 33 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Can someone please ELI5 what his end game is? I refuse to pay attention to twitter, but Elon, he's crazy.

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Google decimates Twitter search results" makes it sound like it's something Google did intentionally, rather than a simple refresh of Google's cache, now that they can't spider their way through Twitter's network.

In other words, it's Twitter that did this, not Google.

I don't support either in particular, but this shouldn't be immediately assumed as retaliation.

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[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

Wait... so google can just do that? Guess Pinterest bought the premium cloud services and never misses a payment. And tips.

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[–] raunz@mander.xyz 25 points 1 year ago

Can I please get this guy's face off my front page? ._.

[–] green_light_stop@kbin.social 24 points 1 year ago

This is such a great example of the potential consequences of making a decision without understanding the landscape/context. It's obvious this would happen in hindsight.

[–] jtk@lemmy.sdf.org 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Maul535@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago (9 children)

One of my coworkers absolutely loves Musk and I can't understand why... The guy's a joke. I feel like people think Musk is smart just because he's eccentric and has money, I hope eventually everyone comes to see just how normally intelligent he actually is

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[–] Pillarist@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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[–] assembly@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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[–] grinde@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I saw the result with 227 million earlier, but I just checked again and now it's 648 million. Odd.

[–] Ir0nfire@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

It might be catching and data mirrioring. When you run something as large as google there are hundreds of servers that need to be synced. Deleting large chunks of data can take an extremely long time to propagate.

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[–] OasissisaO@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not that I frequented Twitter that often, but damned if forcing me to login is going to happen.

I'm not trying to do anything to increase their traffic or numbers.

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