Twitter changes impact tweet search results on Google
"Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content."
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SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter's recent changes have affected Google's ability to display tweets and Twitter pages in search results.
"We're aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results," Google spokesperson Lara Levin said in a statement to The Verge.
"Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content."
Twitter recently made some significant changes to the visibility of tweets on the platform.
Last week, the platform blocked unregistered users from being able to browse tweets. Later, it introduced "temporary" limits for the number of tweets people can read per day.
Levin's statement suggests that the modifications have affected how Google crawls Twitter.
When Search Engine Land compared the number of Twitter URLs that Google had indexed between Friday and Monday, the statistics clearly indicated that something was wrong.
Friday last week, Google had indexed 471 million results for "site: twitter.com," but on Monday, that number was down to just 180 million.
"Given Twitter's rate limits on tweets are supposed to be temporary, there's a chance that if those lift, we might see the usual amount of tweets in Google search results in the future," the report said.