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.
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.
If your company cares about it's SEO rankings, you don't make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.
Not even a month later and said company rebranded itself without checking trademarks. Now we have "X", a brand that non only risks infringement of quite a few registered eu-trademarks but didn't even apply for an own eu-trademark...
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?
No it's just one guy called Dev.
And he's on a H1B visa and can't leave.
Dude was just a marketing intern and is mad stressed and knows he's in WAY over his head now.
Fake it 'till you make it.
Or the multibillion dollar company collapses into a heaping, flaming pile of slag as a result of your actions. One or the other.
Itâs a win/win
They screwed up his name tag, because reasons.
His name is actually Dave. But there aren't any other Dave's working there anymore so he is ok with being called Dev.
Deb on the other hand is pretty pissed off.
Or maybe it's this guy, Dev from a canadian tv show called The Listener. They called the hacker 'Dev', I'm assuming it's on purpose.
https://thelistener.fandom.com/wiki/Dev_Clark
My understanding is there's group of people whose visa is sponsored by Twitter. If they leave the company, they may well have to leave the country.
That's a big yikes and I hope they will find another way...
Coercing workers built America! They can't leave... because of the implication.
Yeah, he lives in the break room on a cot.
Twitter still has devs?
Twitterâs dev(s)
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.
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.
The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.
I mean there's admiring a ruthless mob boss - and then there is admiring a petty thief that keeps getting arrested and all his plans blow up in this face.
Spez is losing his tiny mind.
Oh, there's scope to introduce "official" Reddit user badges for 10 bucks a pop and all of sorts of suicidal Musk shenanigans
Wait until you have to be logged in to read any posts on Reddit.
Didn't we achieve this by turning all subreddit NSFW?
I'm down, Spez. What's bad for Reddit is good for us.
Honestly... We're all (or a massive chunk of us are) Reddit refugees. I don't give many fucks about that place. If it thrives, whatever. It's out of my control. I'm not going to hate post here with fantasies of spez seeing it and being like, "WHYYYYY?"
What little I've seen here seems like a disproportionate amount of passionate and quality users came over here. Users that were likely a bit more than casual; ie we we invested enough to use 3rd party clients, some of us are probably former mods who got disillusioned, etc.
We're all giddy and it is the honeymoon phase and I HOPE HOPE HOPE the users' enthusiasm doesn't fizzle like Mastodon seems to but I would say, just use this. Enjoy it. Post worthwhile things. I don't think Reddit is necessarily going away, but if it's just some weird bot riddled, low effort posts sort of place, why would we want to be there anyway?
I saw people unironically saying this and being upvoted for it in hackernews, completely turned me off from the site lol
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.
Heâs the child of an emerald mine owner. Do people think that men like that choose wives based on how good a mother theyâll be? Doubt.
I think itâs called a âFucker-Upperâ
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?
"CFU of Twitter" does have a nice ring to it
Then Spez could be CFU of Reddit. I kinda miss Ellen Pao. And Chooter.
Edit: A word.
Chief twit was something he called himself, for all that says
Lol
Gotta have someone to push off the glass cliff
Thanks for sharing, I hadnât heard of that expression or phenomenon.
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...
Yeah that's crazy, I was furious when they fired Victoria back in the day. It's nice to see that Alexis Ohanian is the one who deserves the blame for that massive fuckup. Man that gives me a pang of nostalgia for the old days of reddit though. Interesting that the Wiki article points to Obama's presidency and the 08 financial collapse as a "glass cliff" event.
Remember this?
-( ͥ° ÍÊ ÍĄÂ°)âŻâČ___ćććć Don't mind me just taking Ellen Pao for a walk
Both Musk and Huffman seem to think the E in CEO stands for âEnshittification.â
Edit - typo
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 Iâm 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.
That was just the tipping point. Reddit has been in a decline for a few years but we were all like frogs in boiling water but we accepted it because we didn't know where else to go. RIF shutting down forced my hand and now I'm here. Hopefully to stay.
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.
As someone who spent the last 13 years browsing reddit almost entirely with RIF, if it hadn't been for third party services I'd have left when they added awards.
Now we need to do the same thing with YouTube and Twitch
That would be nice, but is at a whole other scale with bandwidth and storage space.
Although there is a fediverse alternative for Video Hosting: https://joinpeertube.org/
Doesnât 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 thatâs what they will index. Google isnât 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.
Iâm only an amateur but Iâm 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.
Impersonating a Googlebot user-agent isnât a perfect test though, since youâre supposed to implement IP verification too - either checking against a known list of Google crawler IPs or doing a PTR lookup. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot
Question is whether or not Twitter has competent software developers implementing stuff correctly anymore. Anyoneâs guess at this point.
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.
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
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
Oh I bet the actual employees are painfully aware. But the lack of funding and government red tape? That's the real failure.
Iâm always totally surprised how willfully European governments have put so much power into the hands of Twitter. Nearly every organization and politician has a Twitter account to be used for official and semi-official communication. And Twitter isnât and was never really very popular in Europe compared to Facebook and other social networks, which these same organizations and politicians demonized to the max. I hope this is a wake up call: there are no inherently good centralized and commercialized social networks fit for communicating important information to an audience of potentially everyone.
Yeah, Iâm still baffled by the fact that all these officials are still on Twitter.
Yeah. Moronic to use Twitter for anything even remotely important like emergency alerts
I disagree.
Twitter was one of the largest social media platforms on the planet, and was especially huge in the US. Before Musk bought it it didn't show any signs of failure. It lasted over a decade, and had enough reach that I think it made a lot of sense for things like emergency alerts, government officials, etc. to use it as one means, even a main means, of disseminating information. It was really effective at that until what, a year ago?
I don't think anyone really predicted Elon Musk buying Twitter and running it into the ground within a year. Yes, it was hypothetically possible in our capitalist system, but there was no indication that it would until Elon made a joking tweet.
Because of how the modern internet has organized itself, it was inevitable that critical systems would utilize Twitter for it's reach.
I think you're applying hindsight and expecting people to have made decisions based on events that hadn't happened yet. Before musk bought Twitter it wasn't at all unreasonable for people to rely on it for information from government officials because it was the format millions of people were accustomed to receiving that information in every day.
Well then since this is hindsight then I hope everyone is learning now that we shouldnât be relying on single corporate entities to deliver our emergency notifications.
âRetrospectively, it was a bad ideaâ makes more sense.
It's like this. Ambulance use the road even if the the hospitals didn't build it. Now imagine, twitter is the road.
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.
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.
You know how conservatives project? Think about it as the truth, but with a small change in detail such as the guilty party renamed to an enemy scapegoat. Now rethink what you said.
Conspiracy theories that parallel real conspiracies are the best way to stop people thinking about each view on its own merits. They conflate dumb q stuff with the legitimate similar thing and then refuse to engage intellectually. This is why the internet is so noisy. They KNOW that the Streisand effect will be counterproductive so instead they spam dark strawmen and noise until you just tune out because of the difficulty to process information.
Climate activists drowned out with astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion which de-legitimizes and generates hatred towards activists and allows the passing of totalitarian laws to prevent future protests etc.
Examples
Climate activists -> Extinction rebellion
Animal rights activists -> PETA
Anarchists -> Sovereign citizens
In the end you will hate all the legit groups because of the astroturfed false flag strawmen groups.
This is such a good way to word this kind of phenominon. Conspiracies as distraction.
Its also funny, because its a conspiracy about conspiracies lol
What's wrong with XR?
People who aren't going to do anything either way like to blame XR's protests for their own inaction.
I think it's far more simple that humans have a tendency to fractionalize everything they're apart of than it is a projection global conspiracy.
Some animal rights activists believe humans can have beneficial, symbiotic relationships with animals, like working dogs/horses, free range chickens that are well cared for, stuff like that.
Some animal rights activists think the concept of a working dog/horse as abhorrent because animals can't actually consent to that, the power dynamic makes it unethical, and utilizing the labor of an animal for personal gain is basically just slavery for a creature with less intelligence.
These two groups are closer to each other than they are to any right person that doesn't care at all for animals, but are still so dynamically opposed that they simply couldn't operate together because their end goals are dramatically different.
I'm a hardcore progressive. I will work with a capitalist democrat to get my goals met, but I wouldn't associate with them if I had a better option.
What you and I are saying can happen naturally as well as artificially. I'm mostly talking about how that regardless of if they are co-opting delegitimisation propaganda in origin or natural in origin, that the incorrect one gets amplified through common media in clearly suspicious and divisive ways. There certainly are a lot of differences in each group, some legit and some not. What if the different groups can have a correct subset and an incorrect subset? We are meant to discuss and reject the incorrect subset.
You know how conservatives tend to have this one cherry picked crazy example of us sometimes? Those always feel like propaganda campaigns and if you trace and investigate them more you can see they have questionable roots. An example would be the /r/antiwork mod that interviewed on television. notice how he was the worst possible example of us and went on tv after everyone said that it was a lose/lose scenario, that if they air it, you lost, and if you win they wont air it therefor you still lose.
Why does every group have a very heavily advertised and mysteriously promoted subset that betrays the movement in effect but looks valid superficially? I've seen a hundred times more about sovereign citizens than I've seen about actual anarchists talking about ideals.
This hurts :( My whole life feels dishonest because I cant find the right people to associate with in real life. I feel your pain.
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.
I'm picking at nits here.. but
Are you really suggesting that no action has ever been malicious that seems stupid? Copying people on the internet doesn't make
youtheir idea right lol. I personally believe that phrase is damaging and possibly propaganda in origin, same as "absolute power corrupts absolutely"As for the other things you said, I think you can both be correct at the same time.
Well said. Razors are guides in developing theories, not evidence. To present them as evidence is a fallacy. The above conjecture isn't better explained by stupidity, thats the whole point.
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.
Normally I would tend to agree with you, but look where Musk got his "loans" to buy out Twitter. Saudi Arabia and Russia where big "lenders".
That's definitely true. I think it's also true that the people who financed it were doing so to take advantage of that to their own ends.
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"
Iâm glad Iâm 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 itâs 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 didnât continue giving away âtheirâ 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 donât think even the dumbest billionaire or government wouldnât 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 donât like and put them offline in crucial moments. Destroying them without a clear, centralized alternative isnât really sensible.
I personally expected the Reddit IPO to be the end of any âsubversive investment adviceâ, that might have been on Reddit.
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.
I have never heard a more perfect description of Elon Musk.
Michael Scott's heart can be in the right place, Musk is straight cruel.
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 âsmartâ to listen to advice have sycophants.
Great. Do Pinterest next.
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
And Tiktok. And Quora.
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.
In general: cloud providerâs marginal costs for continue to host something while a customer doesnât pay is negligible. Keeping it running while incurring more receivables, or blocking access while making it clear there is an easy way to reclaim data and functionality, are immensely more profitable. Nothing to âretaliateâ really.
I really hope google spammed musk's phone with calls about the outstanding balance.
The reality is that this guy leading the company is refusing to pays bills for other services like he is on a bankruptcy spree. So not surprising that people don't get over his 'he paid it on this one item, so stop'.
Just because he orderer a massive dinner, and finally paid for the drinks, does not make that guy a person of illl repute.
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.
I finally managed to unsubscribe to that crap. Took me forever!
I haven't gotten any in a while but I'm up to 9 Quora email addresses in my block list.
There was a time 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.
Good advice except you forgot the minus symbol, this tip will ONLY get Pinterest links.
I think the point is to NOT have pinterest spam your search results that you cannot see without an account.
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
I want a federated wiki. But bad actors resistant somehow.
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.
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.devare 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...
Would be lovely if we could just start a search with
fedi:oractivityPub: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 âsite:lemmy.worldâ into Google to see what it has indexed on that instance for example. I donât think Lemmy is optimised for search yet, but I saw some GitHub threads around the topic.
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.
Weâve had Twitter since SMS cost per-message on most plans.
It was great for following breaking news and not much else.
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
Twitter absolutely DESTROYED by RATE LIMITING and ELON
Um actually đ€ decimating it would be 47 million links đ€ not 227 million
Um actually a word's etymology does not define its modern usage. đ€
It does if people use it correctly
Found the language prescriptivist! Linguists, letâs all point and laugh at them!
Well that's what happens when you don't want to pay the bills.
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.
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
They absolutely did (do? I never visit it)
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.
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.
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.
He also said âdoing evil thingsâ but Iâve seen no evidence that they have âdoneâ anything. This could be just be the algorithm responding to these tweets no longer being visible without login.
Musk is moving on to the FO part of FAFO.
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.
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.
But he'll gladly suck some Saudi dick if it marginally increases his net value.
Side note; I'm so glad that one of his daughters is trans because it helped expose him for the absolute fucking bigot he is. I stopped being a fanboy after the whole 'pedo guy' incident, and it's been nice to have people finally come to the same realisation I've had and apologise for trying to defend him back then.
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 wonât 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.
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?
In that case let's thank him for spending few billions doing that! Thank you Elon :p
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.
He can't write off 44 billion though, he would get a tiny fraction of that and there are debts to pay back to investors.
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.
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.
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.
"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? ._.
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
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...
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
Personally, I'd say that's stretching it a bit... đ
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.
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.
Doesnât 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 thatâs what they will index. Google isnât 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.
Musky is probably wondering how to charge search engines indexing his site for free
And that, good folks, is how you run a service into ground.
I'm enjoying watching Twitter go up in flames in real time. đż
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.
What is his endgame
He doesnât have any . He thought it was easy and everyone else is stupid.
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 doesnât. I imagine once he sinks it heâll say it was all a 4D chess play to destroy centralized social media and save freedom of speech though.
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. Itâs a flaw of mine.
#BoycottGoogle #BoycottMusk #BoycottBillionaires
Google didn't do anything, musk is the one who made them disappear to googles bots.
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...
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.a part of me wants this to get worse so that people finally realize elon is insane once and for all
shirley this has nothing to do with the massive outstanding bill twitter owes to google cloud
It could be something like that. And stop calling me Shirley.
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.
I guess that's what happens when you don't pay your hosting fees.
Imagine the mailbox getting all the âthere are unresolved Mobile Usability issues with your site Twitter.comâ and ânew page indexing issues discoveredâ from Google Search Console Team
"ding dong the bird is dead!"
that's it folks!
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.
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.
Doesnât 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 thatâs what they will index. Google isnât 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?
Queue the person on the forums telling you that itâs your fault and not the search engine because somehow youâre doing it wrong.
"person"