Twitter, under the new management of Elon Musk, is a different one than the one we were introduced to more than a decade ago. In just a few months after Elon Musk took over the social media platform as CEO, the platform started charging people for the blue ticks that indicates verified accounts. In a recent stir, the platform restricted contents to just people who are registered on the platform. A little later, they introduced a rate limit, where non-paying users get to see only up to a certain number of tweets a day. Specifically, you get to see up to 600 tweets a day before a limit error comes up to stop you from scrolling some more. Now, Twitter results are disappearing from Google search results.
While it may seem to be a deliberate move from Twitter to limit access to the platform by unregistered users. The disappearance and lack of Twitter content is a direct result of Google simply not picking up tweets from the platform because of the access restriction from Twitter. The Google Search engine still picks up feeds from Twitter with their API, but it has reduced significantly as noted by Search Engine Land. According to their report, Google Search has dropped more than half of the indexed URLs from Twitter. That is not to say that you cannot see tweets from Twitter in a Google search though. You still can, but you can only see new tweets that are made public. There are no mentions currently indicating the age limit of a tweet showing up on the Google Search platform.
There are rumours that this is just a temporary thing. Speculations regarding the lack of Twitter results in Google Search is due to the large changes happening within Twitter and for its users. In 2015, Twitter and Google had a deal where Twitter gave access to the full stream of tweets on Twitter’s platform, known today as the “Firehose”. While that was done before the Elon Musk era of Twitter, there are no reasons to believe that the deal has changed in any way for now. Then again, Twitter and Google are keeping any information close their chests for now, so we may see a change in stance from both parties in the coming days.
The move to limit Twitter only to registered is nothing new in the social media space. If you want to see a post or story from Facebook, you must get registered with the platform. Even for Instagram, you are only able to see single posts from users before needing to sign up for the platform to have access to the library of content the platform holds. In this sense, Twitter is technically pretty much just following in the steps of other social media platforms. Still, we think that closing off access to Twitter might be more damaging than helpful to the platform, especially since Elon Musk is focusing on monetizing the platform. It limits the option to run ads that could even be visible from Google itself and reaching out entire populations that do not have Twitter accounts or have no intention to get on the platform just to entertain themselves with microblogs.
Nothing is confirmed at this point, but Elon Musk may just denounce the deal with Google at any time. While it does not sound like a major loss to Google, it is a small loss to content creators who are active on Twitter. It is a loss in exposure of the platform and users. It closes off the platform to be used as a public announcement platform too in this case. Currently, only time can tell whether or not this is going to be a permanent thing.
