cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/999543
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 wonder, is this because they can’t scrape the site anymore? Is it a deliberate move? Or is there some other effect?
Because you need to log in to view tweets. Most people don’t login to view them.
From what I understand Elon owes Google quite a bit of money for hosting related services and I’d expect this is partially due to that.