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.
“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