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1y ago

Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets

www.rawstory.com Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets

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...

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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Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets

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418 comments

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.
- The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
  
  This is correct.
  
  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.
  
  Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.
- 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
  
  They have more than one dev left?
  
  Twitter still has devs?
- 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.
  
  that actually makes a lot of sense
- The word bots triggers the muskrat.
- I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.
  
  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.

Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
- Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?
  
  Spez already said he admires how Elon is running Twitter.
  
  Oh, there's scope to introduce "official" Reddit user badges for 10 bucks a pop and all of sorts of suicidal Musk shenanigans
- I saw people unironically saying this and being upvoted for it in hackernews, completely turned me off from the site lol

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.
- God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.
  
  I’m only an amateur but I’m happy to give it a go
- 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.
  
  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.

Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they'reat it.
- 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.
  
  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
  
  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...
- 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.
  
  You can omit search results from certain sites by adding -quora.com to your search if you're feelings motivated
- 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.
- I have a chrome plugin to strip any Pinterest results from searches, it's the absolute worst
- What did pinterest do? Isn't it just a bunch os pictures put together?
  
  some cases with pinterest result is absolute garbage and might as well better to search on search engine image instead
- Most underrated comment

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- And for the better too. People will come to realize that there are better ways to socialize on the internet.
  
  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.

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?
- She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.
  
  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.
- I think it’s called a ”Fucker-Upper“
  
  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?
  
  Lol
  
  Lol, this made me chuckle! 🤭
- Ever heard of the glass cliff? You might even see a name or two on that list that you recognize.
  
  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...
- Gotta have someone to push off the glass cliff
  
  Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard of that expression or phenomenon.
- Both Musk and Huffman seem to think the E in CEO stands for “Enshittification.”
  Edit - typo

Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren't readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can't see it unless you log in. Most people aren't going to create an account just to do that.
- This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair
  
  Yeah. Moronic to use Twitter for anything even remotely important like emergency alerts
  
  Oh I bet the actual employees are painfully aware. But the lack of funding and government red tape? That's the real failure.
- I hope this results in companies no longer using Twitter for their communications. It's completely inappropriate.
  I've missed two trains and had to take and Uber until I recently found the only place the train company reliably posts updates was Twitter, over their own damn website.
- Using twitter for any kind of emergency communication is a very bad idea in the first place.
  Twitter is doing everyone a favor by demonstrating exactly why that is.
- Heck i couldn't easily check if diablo 4 servers were wonky because I can't check the blizzard Twitter. Obviously this is less important than an amber alert. As another reply said, I think police need a better way to disseminate emergency information and that is on them. However something like server status is a perfect use of Twitter that is now close enough to impossible to do. If public agencies are going to continue using Twitter for these purposes, then something needs to change. Personally I'd be ok with the government having a little more say in things if we are going to continue viewing Twitter as a public service.
  
  Alternatively, it's probably better long-term if those functions become replaced with official Mastodon instances that are for official announcements only.
  eg If there were a California.Gov Mastodon instance with a !alerts@california.gov and a !earthquakes@california.gov then everyone in that area could just sub to those communities and if there was something to announce it could go out via those. Of course that presupposes that enough people are in the Fediverse for it to be a good platform to share that info but structurally it's probably far better than letting a third party commercial interest host these things.
- This is exactly why we should be encouraging local libraries, universities, law enforcement, city, and county governments how to set up Mastodon servers.
  On the one hand, when you have a duty to inform the public, it no longer makes sense to suffer at the whims of tech billionaires. There was a time, for a decade or two, when these sites prioritized access and predictability, but no more. When you have information that you need to have accessible, the only guarantee is to control it yourself. They can still use corporate social media to get the message out to their network, but link it back to their mastodon account. Roll it into their IT departments just like their email server.
  On the other hand, it's a critical step for the success of the fediverse. Universal email adoption came about because it was used by government and universities. What you could call the original social network is still an open protocol, it's not owned by any single corporation or government, and still the primary form of communication online. About 2 billion emails have been sent since you started reading this.

You've heard of a "walled garden".
But this... this has become a "walled right-wing dumpster".
- A "walled swamp",
  What's there not to like?!
- They've always wanted to build a wall. Hopefully they wall themselves off from the rest of the world.

Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
- I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.
- This sounds a lot like Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
  Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn't it much more likely that they're just ... disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.
  
  The only person in the world you can ever truly know is yourself.
  So when I ask myself "If I were spez/zuck/musk why would I do this?"
  The answer is usually "because someone gave me a lot of money"
  
  Yeah, I also seriously doubt there's a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves.
  Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it's more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it's a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he'll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.
- I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking about this. I had no idea about the Saudis owning Twitter like that. All decisions made by the rich are for Money^TM. Usually it’s Money^TM in either the form of growth (profit, short term) or investment (power, stability, long term). Some of spezs actions are easily explained by Money^TM when you take into account LLMs mining reddit. But that does not explain being so insanely hardline with their API. There was absolutely a resolution to that that was profitable and didn’t continue giving away “their” information for free. This is where I think a 3rd Money^TM comes into play: existential investments. These are actions they take to ensure the other two forms of Money^TM continue to function the way they want them to. Such as tanking the two most significant online tools for organizing collective action against them.
  
  Decisions at that level are made for power. Sometimes money is part of that
- While I like both takes, I don’t think even the dumbest billionaire or government wouldn’t recognize the value one centralized tool has. It would have been sufficient to control both Twitter and Reddit, moderate the hell out of topics they don’t like and put them offline in crucial moments. Destroying them without a clear, centralized alternative isn’t really sensible.
  I personally expected the Reddit IPO to be the end of any “subversive investment advice”, that might have been on Reddit.
- Agreed. It's no coincidence that both Twitter and Reddit are shitting the bed at the same time.
  Elon is pretty clearly an actual idiot, and has managed to get by thus far by just having a seemingly endless supply of fuck you money, but this is just capitalism doing the Predator bicep meme with foreign oligarchs to consolidate power.
  
  I mean, it sort of is. Unless the fed is involved in this billionaire conspiracy also (which the nature of conspiracy theories will undoubtedly have someone saying of course the fed is in on it with the billionaires).
  The simple answer really does make the most sense here. Interest rates are on the rise, and platforms like twitter and reddit have been around for a very long time and none of the venture capital backing them has ever turned a real profit despite the money being pumped into them. Investors will pull out money from the riskiest items first when interest rates rise, and the riskiest items are social media platforms that haven't demonstrated monetization potential even after a decade of use and monolithic control within their spaces. If a link aggregator like Reddit, which is really the only major player in its brand of social media can't turn a profit with basically no competition why would you continue supporting it?
- Saudi Arabia murdered Khashoggi because he was defying their army of Twitter trolls with a network of volonteers he bankrolled.

Mind you this is not Google doing it on purpose. This is just Musk's genius idea of blocking tweets without being logged in. Others will drop as well, they just need some time to expire. Also, if you are wondering if they can show tweets to crawler but not show it to others Google doesn't look favorably on that. Content must appear the same to crawler as well as humans.
- Note that Google allows plenty of login gated content which is actually against their indexing terms.
  The key is not to force it for every viewer or give a few view credits. The fact that Mollusk gang doesn't know this is very reflective of their current capabilities. There's no real talent left at Twitter.
- Broken people breaking things.
  Throw money around recklessly, regard your broken self as some great lord of a realm, treat people as your slaves, then fiddle with little pet peeves in utter ignorance of how and why they work, watch a cascade effect spiral out of control, blame anyone and everyone but yourself.
  This is a right-wing pattern. Look at the orange cock holster and the bullshit he was fixated on while squatting in the White House. The mind of a petulant child.
- Could also be realted to not paying the bills google sent him.
  
  people really need to get over this nonsense. yeah, twitter wasn't paying their bills. but now they have paid it. it was just for some internal analytics services, not the main site, and had nothing to do with twitter's recent downtime.
  google's not going to retaliate against them after they paid.
  
  I honestly doubt it is that, but it might affect things in the long run. Musk could be trying to cut costs, but that's no less worse than trying to force people to pay.

Great. Do Pinterest next.
- And Tiktok. And Quora.
- What's the problem with Pinterest?
  
  It fucks with Images results.

Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I'm sure we're all cowering at his superior intellect.
- Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.
  
  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.
  
  Literally all you need is enough money and you can pay smart people to do impressive things, while taking all the credit.
  
  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.
- 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.

Now do Quora.
- Quora has to be one of the most useless, misdirecting "resources" out there. No idea how much of this changes once you make an account, but every single question is filled up with ads and other people's responses to other questions. It looks so confusing and messy. Who would want to sign up for a site that seems so disjointed?
  
  All signing up for Quora gets you is email roundups that keep coming no matter how many times you unsubscribe.
  
  There was a time when quora was genuinely interesting/useful as an a2a site for all your 'expert opinion' questions. Now it's just another social media
- And Pinterest. I want my quality searches back.
  
  Use google and add "site:Pinterest.com" then search by images. Works better than Pinterest. Also works for Poshmark.

For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It's quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.
- Fine by me. I never saw any value in it, even well before Musk took over. The character limit is guaranteed to eliminate any nuance, and the interface makes it incredibly difficult to follow what discussion there is.
  
  I think originally when Twitter was created, the idea was that it would also be accessible via SMS and so the limit was imposed in order to allow a a tweet to fit into one SMS message.
  We’ve had Twitter since SMS cost per-message on most plans.
  
  It was great for following breaking news and not much else.
  
  It worked quite well as an internet notice board where everyone could post important information to be shared/linked to.
  Now whenever that is tried I just get a login screen
- For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
  This was only a problem because of improper centralization in the first place. From that perspective, this is the Internet self-correcting a defect.
  
  Yes, but it will suck in the meanwhile. People expect these links to last. But instead a huge amount of content will no longer be reachable.
- I think it's more along the lines of:
  Musk: You can't see tweets unless you're logged in.
  Google: Challenge accepted.
- Was already pretty shit with embeds, now it's just shit all around

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.
- Fuck Google, if Lemmy continues to take off we can just develop better search tools within the fediverse. The wider internet has been colonized, the path forward cannot rely on big tech corporations.
  I'm not a programmer/developer so I don't even understand the scale of the work that has yet to be done. But I am deeply committed to upsetting the status quo, and this platform feels distinctly revolutionary. Can't wait to see what the future holds for Lemmy.
  
  It's all well and good to have a revolution, but if nobody knows you're having one then nothing really changes. There are still benefits to centralised services, one of which being scale. To effectively index so much data you need scale, which is why smaller search engines tend to be just white labels of things like Bing.
  
  Ask and ye shall receive. Just saw this post!
  https://lemmy.world/post/963301
- There's nothing about the content being federated that makes it hard or impossible to index. Each instance is just a website with a public webpage that a bot can read. That all a search engine needs to index it. The worst case scenario is the bot will find the same content on multiple instances.
  I did read that the website is loaded entirely through JavaScript and that maybe the Google bot doesn't execute JavaScript so can't see the text. I don't know if that's still a problem in 2023, though.
  This article says it's not a problem, but I didn't read past the tl;dr, so maybe there's a caveat. Like maybe it has to use a popular framework like React or something to work.
  https://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157
  
  Googlebot does execute Javascript, but since rendering JS needs much more resources, JS crawling will happen significantly less then simple http crawling. That's why all big sites still return server side rendered content.
  
  Rendering with JS definitely makes a difference, it's part of the reason SSR is such a big deal for SEO.
- It's already indexing it.
  
  duckduckgo (who uses Microsoft's index I believe) is able to find Lemmy instances already.
  problem is since every instance has its own domain you cannot search all of Lemmy or the more obscure fediverse. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, programming.dev are all different "websites".
  I append "reddit" to my query when I want to search reddit for a human answer to a question. Can't do that with Lemmy, unless the instance is branded as Lemmy.
  Unless there will be an org or volunteers that indexes federated instances and makes them available to search engines to they can be differentiated, finding stuff in the fediverse might be difficult...
- Isn't it automatically indexed? I mean, I can go to lemmy.world in a browser and see the content, wouldn't Google's indexing bots do the same?
- It already is.
  Just put ‘site:lemmy.world’ into Google to see what it has indexed on that instance for example. I don’t think Lemmy is optimised for search yet, but I saw some GitHub threads around the topic.
- Isn't it automatically indexed? I mean, I can go to lemmy.world in a browser and see the content, wouldn't Google's indexing bots do the same?
  
  yes, they have web scrapers that auto index according to the sites robot.txt, you can see what twitter asks to allow scraped by visiting here
  that being said some sites would be prioritized over others, so it's possible that they just deprioritized twitter on it since it's now not as friendly for them. But the current rules are super strict as well so it could just be self imposed
- Honestly, and I hate this, but I doubt they will. The majority of people will never go federated, even though it's so easy, because they suck.
  
  It's the difference between a mom and pop restaurant and McDonald's.
  We don't need everybody to go to the mom and pop restaurant. Just enough of us to keep it afloat.
  
  Maybe, I'm a bit more optimistic though. I think even if they just did something like a read only service that pulls from other federated sources like their web crawlers do for regular sites they would basically be done.
  The only concern there would be people trying to block them like everyone has been doing to Meta.
  
  The Porndex says otherwise
- You can tell from how many upvotes this has that there are just as many idiots here as on reddit lol
  Google can definitely index Lemmy

decimates
Twitter absolutely DESTROYED by RATE LIMITING and ELON
- Um actually 🤓 decimating it would be 47 million links 🤓 not 227 million
  
  Um actually a word's etymology does not define its modern usage. 🤓
  
  Um ackshually, decimating only means removing 1/10th, so what happened is actually many times worse than a decimation.
- Well that's what happens when you don't want to pay the bills.

Musk is moving on to the FO part of FAFO.

Between the garbage fire that is Twitter and the soulless corporate greed of Reddit, there couldn't be a better time for people to explore federated alternatives. These social media giants think they're going to generate more profit by these moves, but they're setting themselves up to go the way of MySpace.
- Obviously, you remember when MySpace was big. "No one is going to use Facebook....everyone is setup on MySpace." We see how that went. So when people say "Aw nobody's going to leave this platform..." I just smile.
  
  I distinctly remember seeing memes being shared in 2019 that read, "Stop trying to make TikTok happen... it's not going to happen". That sure aged like milk.
  
  Also, leaving a platform isn't hard! Like, I get that the fediverse is a little wonky compared to current social media but at the end of the day, its create an account and go. People act like having to pick an instance is some great huge barrier to entry, but the main demographics all grew up using computers. It's like saying not installing a shortcut on the desktop will prevent people from using your program in a generation that grew up with file paths.

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
  
  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
  
  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.
- 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.
- Funny Google's motto is 'don't do evil'
  
  It used to be. They removed that.
  
  Remember when Google separated their parent services into a new company called Alphabet? Alphabet's motto isn't 'don't be evil'.

That post image.
Is it just me, or is Elon looking more and more like a movie villain as time goes by?
- I keep seeing it used for media articles because it's fucking perfect and accurately displays his disdain for the poors. The fact that anyone with less than a billion dollars in net value thinks he cares about them is both baffling and hilarious.
  
  his disdain for the poors.
  Correction: his disdain for everyone who isn't himself. He doesn't even treat his own kids well. His trans daughter changed her name to not be associated with him.
  
  Except for Bill Gates.
- It's one of media's best tools for passive-aggressively shaming someone they don't like. So more than anything his appearance over time is an effect of media turning on him.
  
  Well, I won’t be shedding any tears for him. He is an asshole.

So much for that ad revenue
- Limiting people's ability to view ads was only the start, it seems. Genius!

Ah, that's gonna sting. Google is still most people's gateway to finding stuff.
- What would be a good search engine alternative?
  
  I don't know, I'm one of the google-using lemmings. Somebody else can prob answer though.
  
  Google is fine.
  Duckduckgo if you want an alt.

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.
- Hubris?
  
  Debris
- He does not have one. He's just high on whatever it is he's taking.

Elon's goal is to destroy twitter, per his wife.
- You're gonna have to be more specific. Which wife?
- Wait what
  
  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.
  
  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...
- In that case let's thank him for spending few billions doing that! Thank you Elon :p

"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.
- Yeah it's very much more correct to say, "Twitter decimated Twitter's search ability"
  I imagine Bing is impacted too, though I haven't heard/teated myself

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

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.

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
- I have a friend who defended Musk when I called him (Musk) an asshole. I choose not to bring up anything related to Musk to protect the friendship. Same friend has been showing other signs that he's being pulled to the far-right. Makes me sad.
  
  All it takes is a lack of critical thinking skills to get headed down that road. I've seen a few family and friends get sucked into the far right ideology, but they were already not so bright people to begin with
- My wife told me, "I used to think he was such a genius, the more I read about him, though, I think he's an idiot."
- Hm maybe even 'normally intelligent' is a far stretch...
- normally intelligent
  Personally, I'd say that's stretching it a bit... 👀
- After college, intelligence is overrated. There are other qualities like emotional agility, friendliness, creativity, empathy, but also confidence, money, family guidance and contacts, that actually make it possible for anyone to achieve great success while an absolute genius with a sense of humor working from his basement with a great idea/product may never get anywhere.
- Musk is very good at what he's doing, but few people realise what he's actually doing. He's a showman, and the eccentricity is part of it. He pretends to be a smart entrepreneur, to obscure the real source of his income: government contracts and grants. The Boring Company and Hyperloop are directly going for government contracts, and even though no big contracts have been signed yet, you can bet that money is trickling in via various studies and proposals the companies are doing. Tesla is a sponge for government grants. Via Starlink, Musk went as far as blackmailing governments. And Twitter was purchased via foreign money (Saudi, Russian), and Musk is just doing what he was paid to do. Some may think that he's just a useful idiot, but I firmly believe he knows what he's doing. He's good at dealing with governments and doing their bidding.

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.
  
  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.
  
  This
- 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.
- 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.

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.
- This was my thought too. Their crawler is marking links unreachable as it re-crawls them.

- Nice analogy. Only problem, neither of the combatants is Godzilla, so there's no one for us humans to cheer for. It's more like Ghidorah versus another Ghidorah, the latter being nothing but Kevin heads.
  
  I stopped at them both being monsters, haha, but I agree with your correction.

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.
- There's no way to prove or disprove this idea
  
  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.

I saw the result with 227 million earlier, but I just checked again and now it's 648 million. Odd.
- 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.
- Pretty sure that number doesn't mean shit anyway.
- I'm currently seeing 287 million and 0.4 seconds.

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.
- I've never had a Twitter account. I've never wanted one or needed one to be honest. I do feel like the easiest way to make yourself irrelevant is to gate keep yourself and allow a competitor to just copy your entire platform which appears to be what's happening.
  
  I had, have, one a decade or more ago and then forgot the password to both it and the email address associated. Never really felt the need to re- engage.
  While I understand the value that (once?) existed, I also am happy to see this self-immolation. I was troubled by the lazy reporting, that was becoming so common, of people simply reporting on tweets and responses to them, with no analysis outside of said reactions. But you could fill screen inches with all those links.

I'm enjoying watching Twitter go up in flames in real time. 🍿

Musky is probably wondering how to charge search engines indexing his site for free

Sorry for off topic, but what is rawstory? It's on some tracking blocklist and that url is funny. Although it looks just like any other news site.
- It's a left-wing news outlet. I don't think there's anything malicious there in terms of security.
  
  These blocklists are wack sometimes, I need to keep adding exceptions...
  
  Ehh, I get ~3 pages of 3rd party crap, most of which is on block lists. Red = explicitly blocked, 3rd party scripts and XHR blocked by default (I do also block google.com, gstatic.com and facebook.com whenever they're a 3rd party, but every other red domain is considered dodgy by default).
  One.
  Two.
  Three.
  uMatrix FTW
  Edit: Also I should say that if I were to enable things more stuff would almost certainly load up.
- Left-leaning, mostly accurate, sensation stories.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_Story Probably on the blocklist purely because of the word "raw"
- Some block lists will include newly registered or rarely visited domains.
- The article quotes their source as https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-google-search-drop-35648.html, which are just showing the decrease in search results each day on Google for site:twitter.com.

And that, good folks, is how you run a service into ground.
- He used Twitter to destroy Twitter

a part of me wants this to get worse so that people finally realize elon is insane once and for all

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.

#BoycottGoogle #BoycottMusk #BoycottBillionaires
- If only that did anything
  
  It does. People need to band together to hold these deranged billionaires to account.

Google didn't do anything, musk is the one who made them disappear to googles bots.

I guess that's what happens when you don't pay your hosting fees.

This morning, I needed to use image search for a bit and basically 4/5 links leading to Twitter wouldn't load for various reasons. That was not on Google, but I imagine, they have (had) similar problems.
Well, and for normal search, Twitter results are completely worthless to me, as I don't have an account. So, at this rate, no results from Twitter would be the optimum.

Imagine the mailbox getting all the “there are unresolved Mobile Usability issues with your site Twitter.com” and “new page indexing issues discovered” from Google Search Console Team

"ding dong the bird is dead!"
that's it folks!

Maybe they could allow some of the text to show in order for spiders to index the tweets correctly, something like the first 280 characters could work.

is there a human behind such decisions or is it just an automated algorithm?
- Well, at the very least, there's humans constantly tweaking that algorithm, whether it's for fine-tuning search results or just making SEO less useful.

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.

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?

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