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

DevCat@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 2355 points – Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets
rawstory.com

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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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.

100k people isn't nobody. Centralized services can be useful at times, but there is no fundamental law preventing a decentralized system from providing the same functionality.

The value of indexing data drops drastically when much of that data is junk, as is the case in the wider internet. Because Lemmy is a federation, there is a built in system to filter the junk.