This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they'reat it.
Once upon a time Quora had reasonably accessible information. Now I find it nearly unusable and only go there as a last desperate effort which is generally fruitless. Pinterest is annoying, but generally you can still view some content. What's annoying is trying to download, copy, or isolate content there. If all you want to do is view an image, Google can typically still pull the image out and make it viewable from the search. The problem only arises if you try to go in and see the original.
Please remove Quora links...
Every time I click a Quora link it takes me to a completely unrelated question to the one I clicked on.
I swear that site is doing this deliberately to make it seem like it has more traffic than it does.
It's funny how Spez idolizes a guy who doesn't pay his bills. It's also funny watching the hate pplatform Twitter get absolutely destroyed by its owner. The internet in 2023 is a wild and crazily changing place.
At this point I’m half convinced spez was such an asshole to Reddits users because of how the community turned on his idol elon. I remember not longer than two years ago Reddit was basically musk circlejerk but this genius fucked up even that.
And for the better too. People will come to realize that there are better ways to socialize on the internet.
I can't believe how fast the fediverse is growing thanks to both reddit and Twitter simultaneously imploding. I honestly welcome it, despite the growing pains this feels more like early 2000s reddit than the modern version ever did.
Can't wait for genZ to welcome the return of spaces that aren't optimized for monetization over communication first.
And this is interesting..
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110657916419002616
"rodhilton Rod Hilton @rodhilton@mastodon.social I have some insider knowledge here that I wanted to share.
This is not happening because Google scrapes Twitter and is now unable to. Google has been a paying customer (with a special negotiated rate) of the Firehose API for nearly a decade. Presumably, that deal was still in effect, barring API rate changes having an impact.
So this decision is solely because the results can no longer be viewed by non-logged-in users.
Yeah, if the content is walled off from the public, there's not much point indexing it
It's a shame it's come to this, but there are literal crazy people at the helm over at Twitter...
Great now can they remove Pinterest too please??
Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it's just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn't exist anymore. Google certainly didn't "retaliate", bots simply couldn't find those pages anymore.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
This is correct.
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?
Very good. An evil corporation doing evil things to an evil agenda.
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
Elon's goal is to destroy twitter, per his wife.
You're gonna have to be more specific. Which wife?
Can someone please ELI5 what his end game is? I refuse to pay attention to twitter, but Elon, he's crazy.
You are assuming he has one. Before he overpaid for Twitter, he probably thought he would turn it into a successful version of TruthSocial. Then reality came knocking. Now, he may have no idea what he's going to do.
When you were a kid, did you ever take apart an old vacuum cleaner or power tool, thinking "I'm going to make something great out of this"? Then, when you had all the pieces lying around you, you wondered why you even started because you have no idea what you are going to do now? That may be Elon at the moment. He's looking at the parts of his mom's treasured vacuum cleaner, and wondering how he can blame it on the brother his parents never gave him.
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.
There's nothing about the content being federated that makes it hard or impossible to index. Each instance is just a website with a public webpage that a bot can read. That all a search engine needs to index it. The worst case scenario is the bot will find the same content on multiple instances.
I did read that the website is loaded entirely through JavaScript and that maybe the Google bot doesn't execute JavaScript so can't see the text. I don't know if that's still a problem in 2023, though.
This article says it's not a problem, but I didn't read past the tl;dr, so maybe there's a caveat. Like maybe it has to use a popular framework like React or something to work.
https://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157
It's already indexing it.
duckduckgo (who uses Microsoft's index I believe) is able to find Lemmy instances already.
problem is since every instance has its own domain you cannot search all of Lemmy or the more obscure fediverse. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, programming.dev are all different "websites".
I append "reddit" to my query when I want to search reddit for a human answer to a question. Can't do that with Lemmy, unless the instance is branded as Lemmy.
Unless there will be an org or volunteers that indexes federated instances and makes them available to search engines to they can be differentiated, finding stuff in the fediverse might be difficult...
Would be lovely if we could just start a search with fedi: or activityPub:
Wait... so google can just do that? Guess Pinterest bought the premium cloud services and never misses a payment. And tips.
Probably it's just that the Google crawlers are not being served Twitter content, since Twitter now requires a logged in account. If so the number of indexed tweets should keep dwindling as they expire from the Google index, I imagine. We'll see.
Yeah, I don't know what else they're gonna do. People are already getting pretty fed up with the search results from their core product, the bitching started years ago and it's starting to get pretty loud, with power users of search becoming determined to find a better solution when they can. Don't think Google doesn't hear such things, or isn't aware of them.
So if search starts returning a bunch of results that are supposed to be Tweets but people keep hitting login paywalls, that just makes Google look bad. There's already widely circulated plugins - which Google knows about because they're getting installed on Chromium browsers - to automatically block Pinterest results, people were getting fed up with "fake" image results that weren't usable. The value proposition of what is still their primary business is under attack and can't stand more erosion of trust.
Maybe it looks like retaliation for Musk not paying his bills, but it probably isn't, it's just more fallout from Musk's actions.
The Google search result issue came to a head because of the reddit debacle. With the protest sending so many core subs private it immediately killed any seo those subs had on google search. Even Google made the announcement acknowledging that the reddit protest had ruined search results with most of one of the largest and most visited websites suddenly not being searchable.
If I had to hazard a guess I'd say the trouble at reddit is the first thing to put fire under Googles feet in a long time and now the tech giant's eye is focused back on their main product for generating ad revenue.
So with Elon putting limits on accessibility for his site there is zero chance of Google being able to properly index and cache twitter content, I'd even bet most of the moderation was done by automated indexing systems that could no longer access content.
Can I please get this guy's face off my front page? ._.
People with power shouldn't be allowed any control over platforms that give power to "the people". I believe this is all intentional. If it was just Twitter, or just Reddit, or just 1 TV network, I wouldn't think that but they're sabotaging all the mainstream platforms at once and making it incredibly obvious. They're trying to collapse our means of communication ahead of 2024.
Doesn’t sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then that’s what they will index. Google isn’t a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
a part of me wants this to get worse so that people finally realize elon is insane once and for all
What is his endgame
One of my coworkers absolutely loves Musk and I can't understand why... The guy's a joke. I feel like people think Musk is smart just because he's eccentric and has money, I hope eventually everyone comes to see just how normally intelligent he actually is
