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

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

#31

Post by LarryMullins »

bthrn wrote: post #20
LarryMullins wrote: post #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.…

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.

Google's propensity to return reddit results is a negative to me. Reddit almost never has the information I'm looking for, particularly ever since their website redesign. Even if the search result takes me to a reddit comment section that might have the result, reddit will only show me the top N% of comments in that discussion and then when I scroll down, I see irrelevant top-level posts on reddit about people's cat pictures or something. Yes I know I can install an extension to redirect me to old.reddit.com, but fuck that noise. Reddit answers are virtually never worth that effort anyway.

Consumer advice on reddit is worthless, the subreddits about products are all run by shill-mods paid by the companies making the products. Technical information on reddit is often confidently wrong. And for general inquiries, reddit is worse than yahoo answers ever was. Most of the "I'm a [profession] and I have [experiences and opinions]" posts on reddit seem to be "creative writing" exercises, aka liars motivated by the karma system to make shit up.

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

#32

Post by consumer451 »

wolpoli wrote: post #15

My recollection was that the deal to index and surface tweets on the SERP ended years ago. Was that the deal you recalled?

Now that I look, yeah the deal I was thinking of dates back to 2015. Did not know that expired. But is the Google(Twitter) search experience the same for you right now as it was in previous months?

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

#34

Post by derefr »

pifm_guy wrote: post #16
ge96 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don’t think the technique would be meant to counter blind voting, but rather strategic voting—i.e. counter-voting some particular post down/up with a random member of your bot army every time it’s voted up/down, to keep its count high/low/at some constant value.

I say this, not because it seems like an especially common style of bot to be running, but rather because 1. it would be a rather heavy backend write load on the site if two bots doing this in opposite directions did exist, and ever “clashed” on the same post—and, much more problematically, a never-ending load, as the bots would never be satisfied; and 2. such bots do depend on the exact vote count passing some threshold, so fuzzing votes is a simple way to make such bots confused—not all the time, but probabilistically, enough of the time to make any such “clash” loops eventually quiesce rather than going on forever.

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

#35

Post by jahewson »

Next week, Twitter is starting to charge for their API https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/cash-strapped-tw...

Could be related? Even if they’re just crawling the public pages I could certainly imagine Elon trying to extract money from Google for the privilege.

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

#36

Post by heywhatupboys »

BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #12
consumer451 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

no, just close that popup? if it even appears... when is the last time you've used twitter

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

#37

Post by klyrs »

pifm_guy wrote: post #18
ruined wrote: 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.

HN is indexed in effectively real time as well. I've googled several phrases I've read here, hoping to find more information, where the HN comment of interest is the sole result.

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

#38

Post by hakanderyal »

LarryMullins wrote: post #31
bthrn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google's propensity to return reddit results is a negative to me. Reddit almost never has the information I'm looking for, particularly ever since their website redesign. Even if the search result takes me to a reddit comment section that might have the result, reddit will only show me the top N% of comments in that discussion and then when I scroll down, I see irrelevant top-level posts on reddit about people's cat…

Interesting. My experience is the exact opposite and I lot of my review searches are start by adding “Reddit” to the end.

For opinions on non-tech topics and products Reddit is my #1 source, and I haven’t got burned even once.

But I’ll admit it’s not my only source, and I always cross reference my findings.

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

#39

Post by waboremo »

LarryMullins wrote: post #31
bthrn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google's propensity to return reddit results is a negative to me. Reddit almost never has the information I'm looking for, particularly ever since their website redesign. Even if the search result takes me to a reddit comment section that might have the result, reddit will only show me the top N% of comments in that discussion and then when I scroll down, I see irrelevant top-level posts on reddit about people's cat…

Don't think they were talking about google returning reddit results for generic searches, which doesn't happen that much and certainly isn't a highlight feature like it is for Bing and DuckDuckGo. When it comes to generic searches, google's biggest problem is SEO-farming blogs that are substantially lower quality than even the most inane reddit comment from someone pretending to be an expert.

Rather, when they are specifically looking for something on reddit, using google is much easier than actually using reddit. Counter to the above person's advice in using the site's specific search over general search engines.

Which makes sense, there are a lot of great posts on reddit when you know what you're looking for. Not so great for general advice.

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

#40

Post by bastawhiz »

jahewson wrote: post #35

Next week, Twitter is starting to charge for their API https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/cash-strapped-tw... Could be related? Even if they’re just crawling the public pages I could certainly imagine Elon trying to extract money from Google for the privilege.

My understanding was that Google was paying for its firehose access already. Though I suppose they could be forcing a contract renegotiation.
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