The newly-imposed read limits on Twitter are seemingly blocking tweets from appearing in Google Search. The search engine has stopped showing hundreds of millions of tweets in search results. This is because Google cannot “crawl” Twitter URLs due to the new limit.
Twitter limits are affecting search results
Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently announced that new unverified users on the platform would be able to see a maximum of 500 tweets in a day. That limit for old unverified users is 1,000 tweets, while verified users (who require a Twitter Blue subscription) get to see 10,000 tweets in a day. This is a revised limit from the original limit of 300, 600, and 6,000 tweets, respectively.
Musk said that this is a temporary measure but didn’t specify when Twitter will lift these limits, if at all. The plan is likely to cut down on server bills. Meanwhile, Twitter apps have already started feeling the effects of this change. While it’s unclear if it is an intended change from Twitter or a side effect of the limits, Google Search is unable to show older tweets either.
According to SearchEngineLand, Google Search was showing over 470 million results from Twitter at the end of last week. But the number of tweet results has now dropped below 200 million. A similar drop was observed by some third-party tools as well. 9to5Google performed an analysis of its own and found a drop, too, though the publication saw more than 350 million tweets in Search. We could see even more.
Nonetheless, Google’s testing tools confirm that the search engine can no longer continuously crawl Twitter URLs to pull out relevant tweets for search queries, 9to5Google reports. It can seemingly browse newer tweets but can’t go deep to grab old tweets. The “firehose” is also still working, thankfully. It enables a direct integration between Search and Twitter, allowing the former to highlight relevant new tweets in search results. This works best with breaking news.
While this might bring some respite to people looking for recent tweets via Search, it’s still a pity that Twitter has to resort to these measures to cut operational costs. The platform has already undergone several unpopular changes, including blocking unregistered (or not signed-in) users from seeing tweets or profiles. Now, intentional or not, it’s blocking tweets from search results. It remains to be seen if Twitter will lift these limits anytime soon. It’s facing more competition as Meta prepares to launch a Twitter alternative this week.
2023-07-04 15:05:22