Tell HN: Tweets no longer seem to be properly indexed by Google
I am a bit fuzzy here, but I recall Google having a deal with Twitter and access to the firehose.
I recall finding all kinds of specific tweets, by searching "string," etc.
This does not seem to be the case today.
This is important because you may be used to relying on Google searches to be exhaustive, and include tweets. Now it seems you have to go to twitter.com as well.
64 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadI 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.
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?
a) you'll quickly accumulate more invalid accounts than valid ones, but have the burden of maintaining all of them.
b) you'll continue to provide more signal to reddit from your invalid accounts that can be used to burn your valid accounts.
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.
Isn't it $1bn in interest payments Twitter owes, on what regularity is that paid, every 3 months?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-30/twitter-s...
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.
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.
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.
Results are often completely irrelevant, or dismissive of the search terms.
You search for a refrigerator filter from a known refrigerator manufacturer and the first results you get are the toxic offbrand refrigerator filters from companies with randomly generated company names that poison your entire family.
Somehow Amazon has managed to make the bloated Aliexpress experience seem more straight forward and easy to navigate.
Companies create multiple subsidiaries with randomly generated names, so they can spam search results and faceted results with their products and exclude other vendors. Search for "flying bird cat toy" and you'll see what I mean.
Much of that could be solved using a filter by country of origin. Because the usual suspects are always from the same territory.
Why is this necessary? because shell companies sell products loaded with lead, cadmium, phthalates, formaldehyde, VOCs, and other highly toxic stuff.
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.
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.
I have a similar one for github too:
gh : order by last updated, with > 5 stars, and has been pushed to since 1/1/2022.
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.
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 “<search query> -site:reddit.com” to remove any results coming from Reddit instead of having to scroll past results you don’t want to see.
Reddit is the easy example. I learned ages ago to never use reddit search, always use a proper search engine bound to the reddit domain (or even a subreddit).
With that said i don't use Google. I generally agree that it's an adversarial relationship but at the same time Search Engines often have focused tech that is just way, way better than some random search of some content site.
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2022/12/elon-musk-twitter-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/business/media/elon-musk-...
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-twitte...
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.
This was my attempt at an explanation. I wonder who will blink first and if the public will ever learn the details.
One thing I find important to remember, is that Jack Dorsey gave Elon Musk one bil for the Twitter purchase so maybe there's some kind of Grand Plan that I'm too stupid to see. But would it start with Twitter's bankruptcy?
He can get publicity whenever he wants it, how he wants it. Twitter is the #1 platform for news, and political ideologies to express themselves. If he levels that, it throws a huge wrench since there's really no 'backup'.
Everyone has put so much into tweeting on twitter, now that it could go belly up, how does an entire network pick a good replacement? Doesn't even look like they can because of all the polarization.
If he had some evil designs, tanking Twitter could be worth losing 45 billion dollars if it gives him more power to do whatever he wants to do. Not saying he is, I'm not an Elon fan, but even I don't think he's this stupid (he's not donald trump) - but I guess he could be - if he isn't doing this on purpose he'd have to be.
Yesterday I read this tweet (below) that talks about some military history relevant to current events. I wanted to read more so I googled `"1957" china balloon` and the first hit was the very same tweet. Testing now, searching for a substring from the tweet in quotes works too.
https://twitter.com/NavalInstitute/status/162163973828837376...
"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