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.

  • darkevilmac@vlemmy.netEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • FlagonOfMe@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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

      • varsock@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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…

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      02·
      1 year ago

      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.