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 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.