Comment by jroseattle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jroseattle | Hacker News Reader

The posturing going on right now between Google, Facebook and Twitter is childish and hypocritical. Each company is only interested in leverage against each other, pure and simple. And when that approach stalls, they attempt to curry favor among the public with their situationally-convenient comments.

The disingenuous collective here is ridiculous. Google and Twitter haggle over dollars, Twitter says no thanks, and Google says Twitter "took themselves out of search"? Google goes with what it has for real-time data (Google-plus) and incorporates that into search results, and Twitter calls it "bad for people"? For all the smart people involved in these organizations, I find this public conversation makes everyone involved look really small and petty.

Similar to the game of adding "in bed" to every fortune from a fortune cookie, I now append "because we want to be in control" to every statement from Google, Facebook or Twitter.

Twitter is returning it's pages with all of the links marked as rel=nofollow. This means Google can't index the content that is linked by Twitter users.

That's not true. It just means that it won't contribute to pagerank. But the GoogleBot has discretion to crawl or not crawl the links.

So you're saying that the Google spider should break with expected and normal behavior (honoring nofollow) in order to crawl pages that someone else has gone to the trouble of making noncrawlable?

Yeah, that won't get them into any PR hot water or anything! </sarcasm>

I wished that Reg FD allow public social media posts to be considered "fair disclosure".

But... Twitter did take themselves out of the search results.

I agree with your general comment that these firms have been making disingenuous comments in public and competing for leverage, but it is possible for one to be right and one to be wrong here.

True, Twitter did apply the tactical rel-nofollow. Technically, Google is correct in their statement.

I don't care for how Google is positioning the statement, which sounds like Twitter is trying to hide its information from the public-at-large, and that Google is simply trying to deliver the best experience for the user. It's highly suspect for Google as the source of making those statements, as they benefit directly as a result of Twitter being included in their search results.

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