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.
So, in addition to the “haha lol get fucked Elon”, it simultaneously feels a little shady for Google to immediately do this immediately after payment stops. Not saying it’s a direct retaliation but it’s a bad look all the same. There are a lot of sites that do shit exactly like what Musk is doing to Twitter, and they get put in results all the time. I’ve had to use add-ons to de-pintreat my results.
And just for the record, Elon musk is a dangerous idiot and he needs brought down in the most extravagant way possible. I’m not bringing this up in defense of his bullshit.
It’s not: https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-resumes-paying-google-cloud-bloomberg-news-2023-06-21/
I guess that was boring so it didn’t get much attention.
This is just how search engine works, if the page they try to access fails or doesn’t host the content you are searching they first get demoted and eventually removed. Twitter is login only for several days now so it’s pretty normal that this is happening and it’s likely happening on other search engine too.