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.
Could this, in part, be retaliation for twitter’s refusal to extend their contract with Google?
No: https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-resumes-paying-google-cloud-bloomberg-news-2023-06-21/
Rumor has it that it’s because they failed to pay their debts.
It was so briefly mentioned that I skimmed past it on first reading. Surely that detail is worth more than two sentences. What a baffling decision, to stiff the company that has the single greatest chokehold on the internet.