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.
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.
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?
yes, they have web scrapers that auto index according to the sites robot.txt, you can see what twitter asks to allow scraped by visiting here
that being said some sites would be prioritized over others, so it's possible that they just deprioritized twitter on it since it's now not as friendly for them. But the current rules are super strict as well so it could just be self imposed