Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 65 posts

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

#51
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Googled "HN is indexed in effectively real time as well" and your comment is the top result

Odd the same search from my end brings up 0 results.

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

#52
You can add site:twitter.com to the google search to restrict the results.

"1957" china balloon site:twitter.com gives 677 results so that might explain why you don't get the result you want with a general search. without a _site_ filter its going to have to pick only one or two tweets

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

#53

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.

How long until they have a major outage?

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

#54
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).

Under the same standards, HN (and many other sites) wouldn't be indexed either.

HN doesn't have a login wall to read anything.

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

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Logged out - about two weeks ago, couldn't close the pop-up, no X button. Perhaps it was changed recently but doing it on mobile was simply not an option for a long time.

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

#57
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This spooked me the other day. Made a comment about a phenomenon I knew of and the name I knew it by. Got curious whether other people knew it by that name too, googled the name, and the top result was my own comment made just a few minutes ago.

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

#58

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.

Re: the counter issue; I've had "2" tweets for at least 5 years. I really have 0 tweets, but they mention if you ever delete tweets in bulk, the counter can be off.

They confirm this can happen on their site: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/missing-tweets

Makes you wonder if anything security related has glitches like this.

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

#59
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 would expect it's a database consistency issue across some distributed NoSQL store.

I would imagine that's the cause too. But there are ways to prevent that. It is eventual consistency after all, right? As I mentioned in my other comment, I've had the wrong count for multiple years.

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

#60
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…

OP was saying that the search quality of sites vary and used the commonly cited example that Reddit’s search bar with “” is not as good as doing a Google search with “ site:reddit.com”

You are describing the fact you don’t like to look at Reddit which is a bit different as OP was just using Reddit as an example for a general concept of using google instead of a site’s internal search functionality.

Incidentally you can solve your issue by typing “ -site:reddit.com” to remove any results coming from Reddit instead of having to scroll past results you don’t want to see.

Post reply on HN