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.

  • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they’reat it.

    • Knightfox@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • MrShankles@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        Thank you for typing out my exact thoughts/experience. Saved me a lot of time, not having to put too many thoughts into words.

        I’ll only add that, of course pintrest has workarounds… but I’ll usually spend more time looking for content that isn’t so “locked out”. Cause it’s a pain in my ass trying to go around it when I just wanna see examples of some random bullshit real quick. Sometimes I click a pintrest link without noticing and immediately go back to search, cause fuck that.

        Quora I still click sometimes; cause it’s like a box of coconut-filled chocolates, save only one nutella-filled chocolate… you pretty much know what you’re gonna get

      • Tag365@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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…

    • Zithero@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • Gabu@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          This functionality is currently broken on DDG and was broken on Google about one year ago. Search engines as a whole need complete overhauling

    • allforthebest@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Cras@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      I have a chrome plugin to strip any Pinterest results from searches, it’s the absolute worst

      • anonforker@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        some cases with pinterest result is absolute garbage and might as well better to search on search engine image instead

  • irkli@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    And this is interesting…
    https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110657916419002616

    "rodhilton Rod Hilton @rodhilton@mastodon.social I have some insider knowledge here that I wanted to share.

    This is not happening because Google scrapes Twitter and is now unable to. Google has been a paying customer (with a special negotiated rate) of the Firehose API for nearly a decade. Presumably, that deal was still in effect, barring API rate changes having an impact.

    So this decision is solely because the results can no longer be viewed by non-logged-in users.

    https://universeodon.com/@TomWellborn/

    • Obinice@lemmy.world
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      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…

        • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • minnow@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world
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    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.

    • danc4498@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.

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        1 year ago

        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.

        • danc4498@lemmy.world
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          If your company cares about it’s SEO rankings, you don’t make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.

          • Madlaine@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            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…

      • Cabrio@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.

    • bingbong@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

    • coffeetest@kbin.social
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      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.

      • Pseu@kbin.social
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        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.

  • Tygr@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.

        • damnYouSun@sh.itjust.works
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          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.

        • EuphoricPenguin@normalcity.life
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          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.

      • YellowtoOrange@lemmy.world
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        Oh, there’s scope to introduce “official” Reddit user badges for 10 bucks a pop and all of sorts of suicidal Musk shenanigans

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            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?

            • Marxine@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

    • WldFyre@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I saw people unironically saying this and being upvoted for it in hackernews, completely turned me off from the site lol

      • fluke@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • ShustOne@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • fluke@lemmy.world
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            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.

            • ShustOne@lemmy.one
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              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.

              • fluke@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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.

      • Zithero@lemmy.world
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        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…

        • Shikadi@wirebase.org
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          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.

          • Zithero@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

  • PhoenxBlue@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

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

    • DevCat@lemmy.worldOP
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      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.

      • boopdepop@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        This pretty much sums it up for twitter I guess. Thank god we have fediverse (at least for those savvy enough) to partake in

      • PhoenxBlue@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Rocket@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • riodoro1@lemmy.world
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      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.

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        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.

        • Redtitwhore@lemmy.world
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          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.

      • overlordror@lemmy.world
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        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.

        • Cabrio@lemmy.world
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          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.

            • kofe@lemmy.world
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              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

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    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.

      • jtk@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • mayo@lemmy.sdf.org
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          I don’t know who that is, but that idea comes from creating testable hypothesis.

  • assembly@lemmy.world
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    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.

      • agoramachina@sh.itjust.works
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        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…

        • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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          Remember this?

          -( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)╯╲___卐卐卐卐 Don’t mind me just taking Ellen Pao for a walk

        • FediFuckerFantastico@lemmy.world
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          Yeah that’s crazy, I was furious when they fired Victoria back in the day. It’s nice to see that Alexis Ohanian is the one who deserves the blame for that massive fuckup. Man that gives me a pang of nostalgia for the old days of reddit though. Interesting that the Wiki article points to Obama’s presidency and the 08 financial collapse as a “glass cliff” event.

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      She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.

      • whatsarefoogee@lemmy.world
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        Musk is a manchild who can’t handle being told “no”, so that’s a given.

        But it’s smart of her to put that out in advance. It informs Musk that she will stay out of his way, and she doesn’t have to take the blame for idiotic decisions made by him.

        • kemsat@lemmy.world
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          He’s the child of an emerald mine owner. Do people think that men like that choose wives based on how good a mother they’ll be? Doubt.

      • Deez@lemm.ee
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        Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard of that expression or phenomenon.

      • Afiefh@lemmy.world
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        Someone needs to make this Musk’s official title. Chief-Fuck-Upper. I also heard Chief-Twit circling around.

        Can we perhaps add a list of notable titles to his Wikipedia entry?

        • MartinXYZ@lemmy.ml
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          “CFU of Twitter” does have a nice ring to it

          Then Spez could be CFU of Reddit. I kinda miss Ellen Pao. And Chooter.

          Edit: A word.

    • nPrime@lemmy.world
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      Both Musk and Huffman seem to think the E in CEO stands for “Enshittification.”

      Edit - typo