this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
2631 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

59582 readers
3106 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 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.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] IgotGrapes@lemmy.world 33 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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

load more comments (13 replies)
[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 29 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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] green_light_stop@kbin.social 25 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.

[–] 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.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] raunz@mander.xyz 25 points 1 year ago

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

[–] 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

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] Pillarist@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] jtk@lemmy.sdf.org 23 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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] 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.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] assembly@lemmy.world 22 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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] 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.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›