this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets (www.rawstory.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
374 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] [email protected] 143 points 1 year ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)

God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I’m only an amateur but I’m happy to give it a go

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Impersonating a Googlebot user-agent isn’t a perfect test though, since you’re supposed to implement IP verification too - either checking against a known list of Google crawler IPs or doing a PTR lookup. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot

Question is whether or not Twitter has competent software developers implementing stuff correctly anymore. Anyone’s guess at this point.