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.
Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I’m sure we’re all cowering at his superior intellect.
It’s absolutely beyond me why these idiots don’t pay people to think of clever things and discourage dumb things.
Imagine having your own “think tank”, it works be like living life on cheat mode.
Smart rich people have advisors they listen to.
Rich people who are too “smart” to listen to advice have sycophants.
Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.
Literally all you need is enough money and you can pay smart people to do impressive things, while taking all the credit.
That is literally the complaint from ex-employees of his companies. He is Tony Stark meets Michael Scott. So much money it compensates for sheer stupidity.
Michael Scott’s heart can be in the right place, Musk is straight cruel.
Did we see the same show? Micheal Scott is incredibly cruel all the time and his heart is rarely in the right place lol
“Can be”, not “always is”
I have never heard a more perfect description of Elon Musk.
SpaceX has a lot to benefit from the fact that a lot of people love the idea of working with rockets but the actual job market was very limited with places like NASA only taking the best of the best. Which doesn’t mean SpaceX has subpar engineers and scientists, humanity just has a lot more to offer than NASA and other smaller space agencies could afford to employ.
This. This baffles me. How he was able to run a company which makes rockets which shuttles between earth and outerspace?
I read a quote somewhere from a former Space X engineer that they basically had to create a system to manage Musk and his fragile ego so that they can function normally without Musk getting in the way.
So basically, Gwynne Shotwell is the one actually calling the day-to-day shots, and happens to be a good Elon-whisperer.
I wonder if other companies, particularly VC-funded ones, have staff dedicated to “managing” the crazy person with the checkbook…
So it takes rocket scientists to manage this guy in such a way to keep him from burning everything down around him?
You’re probably right. And it’s wild to think that safely flying astronauts to the ISS probably wasn’t the hardest part of their day that day.
Short answer: he didn’t.
He didn’t create SpaceX, he bought it.
Wait… so google can just do that? Guess Pinterest bought the premium cloud services and never misses a payment. And tips.
Probably it’s just that the Google crawlers are not being served Twitter content, since Twitter now requires a logged in account. If so the number of indexed tweets should keep dwindling as they expire from the Google index, I imagine. We’ll see.
This
Yeah, I don’t know what else they’re gonna do. People are already getting pretty fed up with the search results from their core product, the bitching started years ago and it’s starting to get pretty loud, with power users of search becoming determined to find a better solution when they can. Don’t think Google doesn’t hear such things, or isn’t aware of them.
So if search starts returning a bunch of results that are supposed to be Tweets but people keep hitting login paywalls, that just makes Google look bad. There’s already widely circulated plugins - which Google knows about because they’re getting installed on Chromium browsers - to automatically block Pinterest results, people were getting fed up with “fake” image results that weren’t usable. The value proposition of what is still their primary business is under attack and can’t stand more erosion of trust.
Maybe it looks like retaliation for Musk not paying his bills, but it probably isn’t, it’s just more fallout from Musk’s actions.
The Google search result issue came to a head because of the reddit debacle. With the protest sending so many core subs private it immediately killed any seo those subs had on google search. Even Google made the announcement acknowledging that the reddit protest had ruined search results with most of one of the largest and most visited websites suddenly not being searchable.
If I had to hazard a guess I’d say the trouble at reddit is the first thing to put fire under Googles feet in a long time and now the tech giant’s eye is focused back on their main product for generating ad revenue.
So with Elon putting limits on accessibility for his site there is zero chance of Google being able to properly index and cache twitter content, I’d even bet most of the moderation was done by automated indexing systems that could no longer access content.
Do you have a sauce for that Google announcement about Reddit? I’m interested!
Login screens never stopped google from returning useless pinterest spam.
They do that for any site that isnt serving content anymore…i.e. essentially down. Will come back within a few days usually.
Just Google “NASA twitter” and click on one of the pretty links up top. Those haven’t been removed yet.
I mean, those links are good as dead if you can’t see anything without a login. Pinterest shows you a few things before nagging you to log in.
Very good. An evil corporation doing evil things to an evil agenda.
I mean, is it evil? Seems like removing results that can’t be seen without a login might make sense. Google has plenty of faults but I don’t know if this is one of them
If it is just a revenge for Elon not paying fees for the Google hosting, it would be very evil indeed. Of course, from Lemmy point of view, it is just reason to get more popcorn.
Not providing a service for free to another company is evil?
I gotta be careful about my sodium intake from all the popcorn.
Did Pinterest used to require logins to see their images? I remember I used to get annoyed when search results directed me to that site
They absolutely did (do? I never visit it)
The details are unclear as to why these links were removed. Opining on Alphabet’s morals at this point is premature.
It’s not premature because calling Google evil has absolutely nothing to do with this action.
He also said “doing evil things” but I’ve seen no evidence that they have “done” anything. This could be just be the algorithm responding to these tweets no longer being visible without login.
We don’t need to make up reasons to call corpos such as Alphabet evil. The fact of the matter is that at this time, nobody even knows if Google lifted a finger to forward the delisting of Tweets. For all we know, it could be entirely on Twitter’s end.
Hence, assigning blame to Google for this without understanding their role in it is premature.
Why are you so invested in bootlicking for google? They are precisely one of the mega corporations that fediverse exists to get away from. Peertube and other projects target platforms they own just like lemmy targets reddit and mastodon targets twitter. They are one of many centralised ridiculously oversized evil corps that this entire platform aims to subvert.
Not jumping to conclusions is not bootlicking.
No bootlicking detected. The first sentence of my comment actually belies my contempt for them.
It could also be the search algorithm reacting to all the users returning to google after seeing only the login page
Funny Google’s motto is ‘don’t do evil’
It used to be. They removed that.
Well at least nobody can call them hypocrites.
Remember when Google separated their parent services into a new company called Alphabet? Alphabet’s motto isn’t ‘don’t be evil’.
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What is his endgame
Generous of you to believe he’s thought that far ahead.
I try to see the best in people no matter how terrible they obviously are. It’s a flaw of mine.
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I keep hoping that he at least thinks he has an endgame for the sake of my faith in the world but it becomes increasingly clear that he doesn’t. I imagine once he sinks it he’ll say it was all a 4D chess play to destroy centralized social media and save freedom of speech though.
Great. Do Pinterest next.
And Tiktok. And Quora.
What’s the problem with Pinterest?
It fucks with Images results.
It really does, doesn’t it!?
Do people even use Pinterest nowadays?
I’m always staggered by how regularly it appears at the top of search results.
it’s still used as an image search engine / aggregator but probably not enough to pay the server bill
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.
I feel like Google is going to have to find a way to effectively index federated content at some point. The only way to really get human information is from sites like Reddit and Twitter. And both of those platforms seem to be dedicated to completely imploding at the moment.
Testing testing
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Obviously, this is political and dangerous, and Musk should send a letter to HQ telling them to, well, go to sleep and just not wake up. Google knows exactly what they’re doing. We already know Google has blacklisted Truth and Rumble, and other sites it doesn’t like, and they’re about to do it to Twitter. They didn’t do this to Reddit when it went private. Also, if you don’t believe me, use Bing and search for Truth and Rumble and everything is correctly indexed, then look at Google, and it doesn’t index hardly anything.
I’ve been saying for a while now that Google is one of the most dangerous companies in the world, and one of the most partisan if anything.
If you think I’m being dramatic, just look at some leaked footage to understand how this company operates. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6162889/Leaked-Google-conference-video-shows-founder-comparing-Trump-voters-extremists.html
I won’t even mention their news tab, advertising business, insanely biased search results or anything like that, but google in its entirety is an insanely dangerous company that takes action based on their political beliefs, and because of the scale of Twitter and Google, it’s definitely discrimination and shouldn’t be tolerated. I’m just happy that Google is getting less popular every day.
#BoycottGoogle #BoycottMusk #BoycottBillionaires
Can someone please ELI5 what his end game is? I refuse to pay attention to twitter, but Elon, he’s crazy.
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.
That’s spot on.
This pretty much sums it up for twitter I guess. Thank god we have fediverse (at least for those savvy enough) to partake in
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.
He does not have one. He’s just high on whatever it is he’s taking.
Hubris?
Debris
And that, good folks, is how you run a service into ground.
I am genuinely curious. What’s the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
