Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they'reat it.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
And this is interesting..
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110657916419002616
"rodhilton Rod Hilton @rodhilton@mastodon.social I have some insider knowledge here that I wanted to share.
This is not happening because Google scrapes Twitter and is now unable to. Google has been a paying customer (with a special negotiated rate) of the Firehose API for nearly a decade. Presumably, that deal was still in effect, barring API rate changes having an impact.
So this decision is solely because the results can no longer be viewed by non-logged-in users.
Great now can they remove Pinterest too please??
Yeah, if the content is walled off from the public, there's not much point indexing it
It's a shame it's come to this, but there are literal crazy people at the helm over at Twitter...
To be fair I have never found any useful information on Twitter from Google search results.
So this decision is solely because the results can no longer be viewed by non-logged-in users.
Glad to see (semi) confirmation of this. It's the same reason paywall news sites are magically not paywalled (or less paywalled) when coming from a Google search. If you're showing Google something different than what you're showing users, Google is going to remove or down rank your results.
What makes this more "news-worthy" is that Google and Twitter have had a great relationship for many years and Twitter is typically among the top results (for some topics). Obviously Musk has been destroying that relationship over the past year.
Can I please get this guy's face off my front page? ._.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This pretty much sums it up for twitter I guess. Thank god we have fediverse (at least for those savvy enough) to partake in
He does not have one. He's just high on whatever it is he's taking.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
is there a human behind such decisions or is it just an automated algorithm?
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