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Tell HN: Tweets no longer seem to be properly indexed by Google

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11–20 of 65 posts

Re: Tell HN: Tweets no longer seem to be properly indexed by Google

#11
post #3

They shouldn't index stuff with a login or pay wall anyway, or should put it in a separate tab of the results or something (that is, other than in countries where they were forced to).

But tweets are on the public web without login.

It changes over time, sometimes there will be a dismissable popup, for a while it couldn't be dismissed. It does seem to work now for non-nsfw tweets, but nsfw login-walled ones are indexed by Google too I believe.

Re: Tell HN: Tweets no longer seem to be properly indexed by Google

#12
post #3

They shouldn't index stuff with a login or pay wall anyway, or should put it in a separate tab of the results or something (that is, other than in countries where they were forced to).

But tweets are on the public web without login.

Specific tweets, yes, but if you want to scroll a person's profile, you'll need an account after about a page of scrolling.

Re: Tell HN: Tweets no longer seem to be properly indexed by Google

#14

Some other interesting things I've noticed is counters are often wrong, sometimes even with insane values such as -1. Replies missing from retweet views, missing search results, people have reported that replies sometimes don't work or never appear.

There are now always exactly 35 new tweets to load... on web anyway. Seems to be an increasingly buggy mess.

Isn't it $1bn in interest payments Twitter owes, on what regularity is that paid, every 3 months?

Re: Tell HN: Tweets no longer seem to be properly indexed by Google

#16
post #7

Some other interesting things I've noticed is counters are often wrong, sometimes even with insane values such as -1. Replies missing from retweet views, missing search results, people have reported that replies sometimes don't work or never appear.

> counters are often wrong, I heard about "optimistic rendering" -1 does seem bad. Reddit has fluctuating numbers I thought it was to fight bots or maybe using the eventually correct type db.

I never really saw how making the counters random helped fight bots.

Anyone who wants to know if their bot armies upvotes are counted can just choose 2000 articles, upvote a random half, then see if the half they upvoted have higher vote tallies than the half they didn't.

No amount of delay, quantizing, or adding noise will defeat that tactic. So why try at all?

Re: Tell HN: Tweets no longer seem to be properly indexed by Google

#18
post #13

google is, however, thoroughly indexing mastodon posts, if you have your server and account configured to allow crawling. enjoy

Twitter indexing was basically real-time - you could see a tweet within a few minutes of it being made

Mastodon seems to take many days to appear, if at all. I suspect Google just scrapes the webui occasionally and doesn't use any push-based mechanism for notifications. That probably means it misses some too.

Re: Tell HN: Tweets no longer seem to be properly indexed by Google

#19
I never use general-purpose search engines if I already know which website the thing I'm looking for is on (assuming that website has it's own search functionality.) If I am looking for a wikipedia article, I go to wikipedia and search for it there. If I am looking for a tweet, I go to twitter and search for it there. If I'm searching for something on HN, then it's algolia.

Search keywords in firefox make this easy. I can type "wiki train" into my address bar and it will take me directly to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=train From a usability standpoint it's just as streamlined as typing the same into the address bar and expecting Google to find it for you, except you don't need Google.

Googling everything by default is a bad habit, but one Google obviously likes to encourage. They want everybody to rely on them for everything.

Re: Tell HN: Tweets no longer seem to be properly indexed by Google

#20

I never use general-purpose search engines if I already know which website the thing I'm looking for is on (assuming that website has it's own search functionality.) If I am looking for a wikipedia article, I go to wikipedia and search for it there. If I am looking for a tweet, I go to twitter and search for it there. If I'm searching for something on HN, then it's algolia. Search keywords in firefox make this easy.…

It’s heavily dependent on the quality of the search offered. For example — Reddit’s search functionality is terrible. I’ve found that Google is much better for searching Reddit.
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