I'll bite. What's a niddy noddy?

Debster - it hadn't occurred to me that was a specialist term.

It's a long piece of round wood (think a third to a half the length of a broom handle) with two perpendicular ends, each about a foot long, at different orientations, so that yarn can be wound round them to make a skein (essentially many big loops of yarn) - which, after it is tied and washed and dried can then be wound into a ball. To wind the yarn round the niddy noddy, it is turned slightly with each round/loop, giving it its name.

eg https://www.winghamwoolwork.co.uk/ashford-jumbo-niddy-noddy.html

You can access Twitter without logging in by changing "x.com" in the URL to "xcancel.com". (It's an unofficial site and so can go down if Twitter make unexpected changes in their systems.)

The Google thing might be a general effort to simplify by using one URL instead of one for each country, since anyway results are localised at a level more specific than whole countries. A similar thing happens for me with dg's site which redirects diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk to diamondgeezer.blogspot.com. There's no change in functionality purely from that in either case.

The "100 results per page" might be a different thing. In my experience Google often does randomised A/B testing (testing out tweaks in their interface on a random selection of users). The change might well revert itself quite quickly (especially if you have a dynamic IP).

Thanks anonymous, the xcancel thing is brilliant and gets rid of all the rubbish on the page too.

And the rest seems very logical - I had wondered about the google simplification thing.