For each result you can see multiple pages that include the image. It also shows the resolution and file size of each version. I did a test search for "bear" and clicked on the first result. It showed 14 different pages containing the same image with different sizes and possibly slightly different crops. You can also select a subsection of the image to search for that.
It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior.
I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content. This is a failing of Google image search for not showing alternate matches for the same image.
Bing has it figured out. I can't tell if Google just doesn't care enough about image search to implement it, or if there's some obscure patent preventing them from doing so.
Google's incentives are not aligned with their users.
They used to recognize that long term it's better to make the decision that the users would want even if it's worse short term. The company was founded on this principle when Larry and Sergey tried to sell pagerank to Overature search (iirc) - the Overature ceo at the time said good results were bad because users would leave the 'portal' page too soon and not see enough ads. That's partly what lead to them creating their own company. [0]
I'd guess Google is making an Overature like mistake today. I guess it could also be failure to operate on stuff like this at scale, which also isn't great.
[0]: I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this from Levy's In The Plex, but I read it years ago so not 100% sure this is accurate.
Rap Genius being the most prominent example.[0] It makes me wonder if Pinterest just has an enormous ad spend with Google and Google is unwilling to risk that.
The best I can steelman is that they're sitting on data that shows users actually want the current behavior which is why it's there (which could be true? I don't know - I'm not the average user).
They'd have to disambiguate that from the obvious motivated reasoning that's likely to exist there too.
Even then, sometimes you know better than users when making long term bets about what you do, faster horses and all - it's part art and part science.
Average users are also not necessarily the best to optimize on. 99% of wikipedia users never write anything. Does that mean the users that write are relatively worthless?
Speaking of Wikipedia, nearly 100% of the time when I Google something medical related I want to get the Wikipedia page for it. Not WebMD or Mayo clinic or whatever. But Google never includes the Wikipedia link (at least on the first page of results), so I have to append “… wiki” to the search. I can only assume this is intentional.
I mean “wiki <search>“ works on Google too. But I don’t want to type anything extra. My problem here is if we assume the search engine should be good at predicting what I actually want to see for a given term, Google is failing at that.
The late 1990s and early 2000s was a silly time because of the portals. I worked for a search engine company that delivered search to a well-known portal and I can remember how much we despised what they did with our technology.
Google was able to break out because they managed to retain great talent and was able to stay funded for a few critical years until their bets paid off. And they did so rather quickly.
I can't help but feel that we're back to a variant of the portal mindset. Only now it is more about B2B and spying on users. And it doesn't feel like Google does anything out of passion anymore. There's really no race to perfect technology - just to be good enough to stay ahead of competition.
The Google of old might have invested in image search to fulfil its potential. The Google of today probably sees it as waste of effort.
Yeah it's not Pinterest, it's Google image search. It's been horrible for many years now, but really got bad when they stopped letting you go straight to the image and instead forcing you to the page the image is on.
As an addendum to the point about them being sued, google did something absolutely hilarious in response. They made the "preview image" the ACTUAL IMAGE when you select something, instead of the cache, they only load the cache if the image itself fails to load.
The effect of this is it's in fact muuuuch easier to get at the original image in image search. Just right click the image and hit "view image" or "view image in new tab" and, that's the original.
As mentioned in the article, Pinterest also claims that the problem is Google's:
>A Pinterest spokesperson tells Input that the problem doesn’t lie with the company, but with search engines. “As a search engine, Google controls how results appear based on engagement and how useful searchers find the content.”
Quick tip: sometimes the tiny image thing happens because you right-click to open the image in another tab before it has finished loading in the Google side-column it was in. It's good to give it a moment to fully load, than right-click. Tedious, I know, but helpful maybe.
i waited a full minute before right-click -> open image in new tab, and it still opens the thumbnail-sized image instead of the original. i tried the side-column as well and got the same result.
EDIT: strange, i tried the same process again on the same image and this time it worked! i guess it really is a cache-related issue
Great to hear. I collect historical art images on my computer as idea sparks for my own paint and photo projects, and noted the image loading thing in many of them (others do just load tiny no matter what though).
> It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior.
Yandex image search is also great, you can do semantic search by image and crop, much more advanced than Google. It's so good it feels like Pinterest without the fluff and user accounts.
Yandex reverse image search actually does what's it's supposed to, I use it a lot these days.
Google at some point replaced identifying the exact image and finding different sizes/versions into some sort of machine learning problem where it tries (poorly) to identify the content of the image then shows you images that look similar but are usually not what you actually want.
Exactly. Someone online posted an interesting comic book page and I wanted to know what it was from. Google gave me a random word and a bunch of unrelated images. Yandex needed me to use their cropping tool (the image I had was a two page spread), but found it immediately after.
Not just images. I've noticed that Bing also gives results which helps me fine tune the search terms better to get more accurate results.
Most of the time Google gives me a correct result ONLY if I know exactly what I'm searching for. But that's usually not the case.
Even for technical searches, I notice that many times, Bing gives a more varied search result which helps me.
Conversely, on Google after the first few links, the rest seem to skip some words from my search entirely. It feels as if Google is just trying to give me links to fill up the page and then
I have to go back and put double-quotes against each term. Even after all that, I only get what I want more and more rarely.
Of late, I notice myself relying on Bing more frequently.
When I hit "next page" a lot (because the first page of google results is often crap these days) google gets extremely aggressive about "we've noticed unusual activity from this address" and they make me do a captcha. Well hello! If you'd stop burying the good results I wouldn't have to ask for so many!
And that's yet another reason why I mostly use DDG/Bing now.
I also highly recommend Yandex's image search; and, while it is super hard for an English speaker to use, Baidu's is phenomenal... Google is really just the one that sucks at this point.
After reading [0], I wouldn't want to use Bing without at least a VPN. Not sure if Microsoft has fixed this already, but I don't want to rely on governments/ISPs/anyone on the network knowing the difference between a user-initiated request and an AJAX request for search suggestions.
Bing's 'rewards' system is also the closest thing I've seen to Lanier's proposal of distributed data ownership - not very close to how he describes it, but closer than anything else I've seen. Microsoft has been impressing me lately.
My summation of the idea is that data is very valuable and will be more valuable in the future, but that because the value of a dataset goes up nonlinearly with its size, only the wealthiest will have the means to extract (significant) value from datasets in the future. This will cause massive societal inequality unless the people who create the data are guaranteed a piece of the value created by companies with the server farms necessary to actually create value out of the data we're constantly producing.
Google's search is the best in the world. They're just locking it up and cutting its wings so to speak. They flipped a switch a long time ago to stop the image searches being accurate or allowing actual advanced usage. It was scarily good for a while before that.
Regardless of "cool or popular" there are legitimate reasons not to want to give Microsoft more power over computing infrastructure. For that matter, there are legitimate reasons not to want to give Google more power as well. In either case, the reasons go well beyond what's fashionable.
There's still the issue of false hope. Every now and then I'm looking for something specific that I don't necessarily know what it's called, but I know I'll recognize it when I see it. So I try different queries, and finally find something that looks exactly like it so I click, but end up on Pinterest, where there's generally zero information about the image. It's just a piece of someones random collection. Plus the login-wall of course.
Even the most basic website would have at least some information about the image.
To clarify, this isn't an issue if you get multiple versions of the image, in that case one of them is hopefully not from Pinterest.
A simple solution would be to have a “-site” option for the search. The same way you can use “site:.gov” to only return .gov domains, we should be able to “-site:Pinterest.com” to never see that noise again.
The -x modifier in Google is basically a NOT “x” if I understand my Boolean operators correctly. The - can be combined with other operators to NOR instead of AND. Hope that helps.
> I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content.
That's a bit reductive. I agree Google shares some blame, but Pinterest engages in some pretty serious black hat SEO techniques. This is well documented (and sadly not covered by this article, despite its title).
Google prioritizes results from higher ranking sites. This is what PageRank was all about. It's entirely within Google's power to score Pinterest results lower, pushing them down in the search results. Seems like a Google problem to me, not a Pinterest problem.
Even Pinterest says this is a Google problem. Pinterest can do what the fuck it likes with its web site and how it exposes its HTML to the world - it is Google that needs to decide if it wants these results.
I actually want Google to include these results, but I want it to warn me somehow so that I can make a choice to click on the result or not. If Pinterest is the only possible source for the image then I might make the choice to "pay" Pinternet (by giving them my info) in order to obtain the image.
We've got a former Pinterest employee on this thread describing how they'd specifically manipulated SEO for high SERP rankings. A commercial enterprise doesn't dedicate resources to a "growth SEO team" which coordinates efforts between Pinterest and Google if it doesn't expect a positive benefit from the effort.
But passing the buck to Google for the situation is a manifest and insincere attempt to absolve Pinterest of its culpability and role in precisely the issue TFA is addressing.
No: blame lies squarely with Pinterest, though Google are contributing.
Being manipulated by "SEO hacking" tactics IS a Google problem (or search engine problem) to solve.
Even as far back as the 90s many sites were putting "invisible" paragraphs in their pages to boost site ranking with often completely irrelevant keywords to what was actually on the page.
The early search engines that made it were the ones who put in the engineering effort to filter these kinds of tactics out. Google is just resting on their laurels as top dog in the search space and has been for a very long time.
So, all one needs to do to rise up in Google results is the kind of thing Pinterest is doing, you're saying? Meaning what they are doing works? And has been for years, surviving algo changes by Google?
The question we're discussing is whether or not Pinterest's claim that this is all Google's fault is credible.
If you'd like to have a different discussion, you'll be wanting to have that with someone else.
Yes, Google have a problem.
At best, Pinterest exploited it. At worst, they actively worked with Google for some presumptive mutual benefit, screwing over the rest of the Web community.
Then the pagerank is broken. Millions of daily clicks on their links, two seconds, then back to search results,... this should really bring their pagerank down, because it implies users don't want to stay on that page for more than a few seconds and prefer other results.
Pinterest strips away the original context of the image. You cannot follow or like the artist who created the image. You cannot find out what it's an image _of_! Any value the image had to its creator as an advertisement or portfolio piece are gone. It is a leech and an information black hole all in one.
Hi, I worked at Pinterest and heavily supported the “Growth SEO” team from the infrastructure side 2014-2018 including attending weekly joint meetings between Pinterest and Google. I am primarily responsible for many key internal initiatives that increased relevancy of our images in Google Image Search. AMA
"increased relevancy" -- I have always perceived it as spamming Google Image Search into unusefulness. There has rarely been a site which I've come to hate as much as Pinterest. Even if you decide to click on an image hosted on Pinterest and land on that page, the user experience is beyond abysmal.
I really wish Google had a settings options checkbox labelled "Remove Pinterest results".
Google should frankly just quit indexing Pinterest until Pinterest rejoins the open web. That goes for any registration-mandatory or paywalled site. Looking at you, Medium.
Why? Pinterest is basically a (human curated) image scraper. Most if not all images it hosts can be found on the open web. If Google blocked Pinterest the exact same images could still be found from their original locations. It's like Google image search indexing Bing image search.
Now Medium is a different story as the content is mostly original.
I was responding specifically to the notion that Google should block all paywall or signup gated sites.
I see your point and I think you understand the product better than most in this thread but I think you’re minimizing the value of enrichment that “pins” over images or static links provide. In the same way, the comment section enriches news articles on hackernews and this site is worthy of indexing by Google.
I am not minimizing the value Pinterest adds, but my personal experience is that the signal/noise ratio is not as high as you think it is. I'm not convinced that the metadata provided by Pinterest users is worth the inconvenience.
I think most people here would ask you to please stop, myself included! It has made finding images on the web much worse. Pinterest results are only really relevant to pinterest users, right? Do you see any ethical problems with your approach?
I’ve been exposed to data on this for years and I can say concretely that the average user is getting more relevant image search results than ever before… many just happen to be “search optimized” and “proxied” by the same punching bag, Pinterest.
Sign up is free but if you’d rather not, just close the sign up nag.
The average user likely is just as frustrated as those posting in this thread, but without the context needed to appreciate how much Pinterest spam there is in Google Image Search results relative to prior search results. Being hamstrung on both sides like this, I’m sure those users find what Pinterest floods the search results page with, but I wouldn’t assume that is synonymous with them “getting more relevant image search results than ever before.”
Thanks for your patience in these threads, by the way. Not trying to dogpile on you or Pinterest.
Is/was it a good Company to work for?
The reason i ask is that i find find business shady. And I hypothesize that shady businesses are also shady employers.
I was at Pinterest from 2014 to 2020, so a total of 6 years. I lead a team and was enamored with the product. I saw hyper growth from a 250 employee company to 3,000. I rang the IPO bell at NYSE.
Was Pinterest shady? No, not at all. Most employees were kind and genuine and trying to do the right thing. Was management and leadership all hyper corporate lizard people? Yes, absolutely. Was it a good company to work for as an engineer? I would say no.
The company constantly suffered from lack of quality technical leadership and as a result the lizard people were in control and the politics were of a company 10x at all times. Decisions were almost exclusively top down. Sound technical ideas were difficult to argue for because shady employees would lie and manipulate the lizard people. The lizard people only cared about self preservation and promotion.
I also think Ben and Evan were heavily influenced by their board (Ron Conway, et all) who saw a billion dollar company and wanted to not rock the boat until exit. It could have been so much more than a cash grab and yet I don’t feel like it ever was or ever will be.
I don’t have a good answer for that but I can describe the feeling I got in these meetings:
They were pretty guarded and cagey about everything to be honest. Felt like a favor from a trusted internal contact but our contacts there would not share any details and mostly listen and occasionally confirm our guesses if it was public knowledge. Our meeting agendas were always prepared well in advance and very intentional.
After answering some other questions it occurred to me that Google may have been incentivized by our intention and ability to improve results for image searches. E.g at scrape time, when an image becomes a “pin”, we were essentially creating a enriched view of that image for which Google is able to surface.
Imagine a scenario where the original image was linked in the page as “main.jpg” or “flower.jpg”.
There may or may not be useful signals on the page for Google to infer from. In the case where the image is saved on Pinterest, the title may come from an expert user who submits, “Trumpet Daffodil”. This is a lot more precise and searchable.
We would go out of our way to append keywords to the end of page and image filenames to make those even more relevant. A final file name for this image would be, “eb761df34b9219ffc68e5c9e55a134f0—-trumpet-daffodil.jpg”
OK, I guess I'm not an expert user. I've just tried pinterest.co.uk in Chrome and I get the "Welcome to Pinterest" popup after clicking on almost anything. How do I close this and proceed to the image I selected?
I was able to repro with a VPN on .co.uk . It looks like for some ccTLD (target markets) the nag UI isn’t directly dismissible. This seems to have happened after my time there. I understand the frustration. Either create an account, use a US VPN, or redirect yourself to .com with a specific cookie value set. I’ll leave that exercise to you.
Here are some test URLs which should all be publicly accessible without an account:
You’re in a country (well, technically connecting from a non-US IP) which does not have a ccTLD redirect. This is the same issue as above. It appears the updated code sends a non-dismissible UI for non-US markets (the US is saturated, this is a user acquisition/growth strategy).
Yes, absolutely. I would love nothing more than for every Pin on Pinterest to link to the relevant website or have rich contextual information. I honestly don’t think it was that difficult technically (in most cases) but IMHO “pin relevance” was underinvested in at Pinterest. Ben (CEO) and the leadership team would often make public pleas about “how important it is to increase pin relevancy” and I saw very little action in the engineering organization to support that.
No, not at all and quite the opposite. If I see a result is on Pinterest, specifically a pin result, I’m more likely to click it because I know the image will be delivered fast (I was in charge of CDN strategy) and is two easy clicks to “download image”.
Often when I see other results, I’ll get to the page and there will be some irritating right click disabling script or I’ll have to hunt down the image and it’s a pain.
If the site it links to is dead, I’ll at least have an audit trail I can use to hunt the image down from the metadata on Pinterest.
The source in the article speaking about “size savings” of reducing images is clearly non-technical. That was not the reason as our S3 and CDN budget was essentially infinite.
I would say the main negative of Pinterest in image search results is when the target of your search isn’t the image but context around the image. It’s often lost if the image is reshared from an unrelated site or directly uploaded to Pinterest without relevant metadata (like the site it came from). I think a lot of people forget that GIS often gave contextually out of place images even before Pinterest but now there’s a consistent domain to associate with the frustration of missing context.
Yeah, so - and, cards on the table, I’m one of the folks who isn’t happy with Pinterests’ presence in search results, but - I’m presuming there was a user story around some type of person whose life was going to be made better here. I’m curious Pinterests’ notion on who that person was and what the benefit was to them - “Bob is some kind of user, looking to do some kind of thing. By changing search results in this way, Bob is better able to do that thing, making Bob happier.”
The effort behind search engine optimization wasn’t based on the goal of improving any specific product flow (usually). Most if not all changes were gated behind the outcome of before/after and A/B experiments which were almost solely measured by growth and increased traffic. The problem is that there is obviously a huge disconnect between activity and experience. I often made jokes about putting a 100% interstitial “click me” div over the page and demonstrating our impressive click through rate as a win.
So I would say, the incentive here was to increase search traffic and instigate user activation. Many folks now work at Reddit and are repeating the same playbook. Many folks cut their teeth at places like Facebook or travel search engines.
I am frustrated by pinterest because I often use google image search to not only find an image, but to find information behind it. For example I was looking for images of camper van builds - if I saw a particular photo of a camper van interior, I want to know more information about something I see in it or possibly more photos from the same build. The photo on pinterest clearly did not originate on pinterest, it's taken from elsewhere on the internet (probably violating the copyright holder's rights in the process) and doesn't link back to the source in any way. So I'm left with pages full of images that don't help me in any way because they're scraped from other sites and pushed potentially relevant results to the background of search results. The whole process is just frustrating, and to me that's why pinterest has made the internet worse.
Also dismissing the nag screen as "not a problem for most people" completely omits the fact that it's still horribly annoying and continues to show constantly even when i've dismissed it a thousand times in my life. i'm not going to reward crappy behavior and clogging search results by registering for your site, and even if i did, i don't want to have to log in on a million devices and any time i use someone else's computer to avoid seeing it again
I think there’s some confusion with how the product works:
The images are scraped on behalf of user request along with relevant information from the originating webpage. The goal is that all pins on Pinterest are actionable (in nearly all cases, linking to the original webpage). The most often cause of missing links is for a website to go offline. In those cases, would you rather your Google image search return no results or for a cached image on Pinterest with a link to the original website which can be used for further digging.
> (probably violating the copyright holder’s rights in the process)
I’m from the US and so I can only speak to US law which I’m more familiar with and obligatory IANAL but… counterintuitively that is only _possibly_ infringement. More information would be needed to determine exactly if that is infringing.
Pinterest, like most sites hosting UGC is protected under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c) DMCA safe harbor laws.
The majority of pins on Pinterest are from the “pin-it button” a small snippet of JavaScript which content creators embed themselves on websites. Pinterest offers opt-out mechanisms but the majority of content creators see huge value in the additional traffic generated from Pinterest.
Pinterest is not legally liable for the copyright infringement, but they're still facilitating it and making a ton of money off of it. It doesn't make it any more right.
You're right it's only "possibly" infringement - there are cases where it wouldn't be (fair use) but the default is that generally speaking, it is, and I would be surprised if more than half the content on pinterest was there legally and with consent of the copyright owner.
I understand I'm late to this party, and you didn't specifically open a set with myself. But here's a ball.
You've given six years of your life laboriously manifesting something guided by robots (A/B testing, et al.) and uncompassionate bodies (lizard people, et al.)
What would you think the chances are that your actual resulting contraption is not specifically and solely an implement to ride the leverage of the monopolizing forces of the market? Or maybe an omnipresent vampire sloth, if that is more directly relatable?
Why do you think you were engaged in a net Good?
Incidentally, I ran away from high-tech in 2016, having understood what we're building (no matter the company) and who is pulling our levers (market trading robots). I did not need to hang around to see what it leads to, and couldn't bring myself to do it either. I was physically ill for years prior, and might have well medicated myself to literal termination; I got my wake-up call.
Do I need to be yours, or will you please shut yourself out for a week and reexamine your memories wrt/ conclusions and operating assumptions? You sound like a reasonable person thoroughly misled, I would not bother typing all of this out otherwise. Can you please try thinking for yourself, you can clearly do that well enough. Just shut it all out for a week and come talk to me then.
> Why do you think you were engaged in a net Good?
This is a very easy one for me to answer: I saw the net good firsthand in our users’ faces. The most common response to telling someone where I worked was: “I love Pinterest!” and as a core user, I do too.
My favorite way to browse Pinterest is on an iPad late at night, bouncing around from idea to idea. Discovering interests I had no idea existed within me and inspiring me to be the best version of myself and try new things.
My Pinterest boards are the most honest, reflective, and personal things I’ve ever posted on the Internet. Every imperfect human part of me is on display.
I’m really sorry to hear about your bad experience in tech. I can relate and empathize with how you’ve felt and I hope you’ve arrived at a better place.
If you do ever want to chat my email is my hn username at gmail.com.
I just feel like Pinterest hijacks other creators' content, sticks it on their web site, hijacks google image search, and adds a level of annoyance to most users on par with pop-up ads.
> - A search engine is good when it provides results that are useful and what you wanted.
Agree and I would add that the many relevant results you see today would not appear if it were not for Pinterest users adding context to images and the engineering work to surface these pages and exposing context in a way for Google to fairly rank.
> - Seeing pinterest links in google search is not useful and not what people want (just read this thread)
>
> Therefore, by making pinterest results dominate google search, you have made google search worse.
>
> Google search is the main way people navigate the internet, so by making google search worse, you have made the internet worse.
There’s a lot to unpack here so let’s just start with a simple question: I would ask, “worse” as measured by what?
Pinterest has staffed a team of dozens for almost 10 years to improve incoming traffic from search engines. Their effectiveness is measured by week over week increase in traffic and sustained use of the product from those users.
Literally 10s of millions of increased MAUs from this one channel alone. For these users, they are clearly finding value in the content that is being surfaced. Google also clearly sees value in surfacing these results over others. If you think Pinterest has somehow been pulling the sheepskin over Google’s eyes for over a decade, you’re mistaken.
I’ve worked for companies where I wasn’t the target demographic and I had to constantly remind myself that just because I wasn’t the target audience, that does not preclude a majority from realizing immense value.
I understand the frustration with speed bumps but for the majority of people (US users at least) the signup nag is dismissible and for the rest of the world, it’s a simple speed bump which helps maintain the operation of the business and provides real value back to the end user.
I also have a Wikipedia account, a Stack Exchange account, a YouTube account, a HN account, and countless one-off forum accounts. This is just the reality of the modern web and per-user customization.
I see this kind of PR/marketing speech in all of your comments on this article. Do you do that inteantionally or have you actually gottent used to talk that way?
I am very frustrated and confused by your usage of the term "increase relevance" when it seems to me that Pinterest did exactly the opposite: provide images without context, without relevance. It's a situation many people are very upset about, as indicated in the article. Why did you do it?
Flogging people disincentivizes them from showing up to discuss what they actually know about (i.e. their work), which is a strictly bad tradeoff for HN. You can make all your substantive points without that, so please do it that way instead.
Pinterest is intentionally designed to facilitate rich context around images. That’s kind of the whole idea and value proposition of the service.
Most “Pins” are created with the Pin-it button browser extension or JavaScript embed which associates the website the image is on and other context with that image and retained when “uploaded” to Pinterest.
In the long tail, yes- there are Pins that are void of context because of incorrect user submission (direct image upload) or broken links as a result of the website owner not redirecting when the content is moved. This was a continuous problem that everybody was interested in solving.
You’re mischaracterizing the user experience. As a logged out user the signup nag can be easily closed or ignored and is identical to the logged in user’s. Often times Pinterest has a copy of the image and metadata when the original site may be offline.
Pinterest may be the most annoying, but by far not the only ones who try to coax you into signing up. The most annoying for me is Facebook because of the many businesses that are too lazy or cheap to have a proper homepage and put up a "public" Facebook page instead. Well guess what: if you're not signed in to Facebook, you get an obnoxious "sign in or sign up" popup on these pages which you can't dismiss completely, it will stick to the bottom of your browser window and take up valuable screen real estate...
Loathe though I am to say anything positive about Facebook: I don't find my general Web search results overly spammed with Facebook pages, whether accessible or not.
Facebook seems to me to be actively search-hostile (it has no sitemaps pages --- there are none listed at https://facebook.com/robots.txt), and returns relatively few web search results compared to its alleged size (5 billion submissions per day last I heard).
That's ... in marked contrast to Pinterest, which actively solicits SEO and is overwhelmingly prevalent in image search results.
Nowadays more than ever, is a good time to bring back services like Bugmenot.com which allow you to share credentials login for nagging websites that block their content behind a signup paywall.
Many of my searches these days are just <search terms> reddit. This is especially true when trying to find reviews or recommendations for products I want to buy. I know a lot of companies are gaming things on Reddit, but at least its not 100% like in the results of a general web search. I feel like Reddit is sitting on a literal gold mine here...
As a long-time default-DDG user: DDG doesn't make defining a list of default-excluded sites any easier.
I do run many DDG sites via a bash function (see below). I suppose I could append a list of sites to exclude from results to that, though it would be somewhat ugly. That won't fix searches from a GUI browser though (unless I were to proxy those though some mechanism ... hrm...).
The bash function (any other browser could be substituted, I happen to like w3m):
what did you search for? I searched for a few thing like kittens, ducks, and cookies which I figured would have a big contribution from pinterest and I didn't see any at all? On google search of course
i extremely reluctantly removed DDG as my default search yesterday. it's been my default for more than a year but the results were so, so consistently worthless even for basic things.
I find this line of argument very unconvincing because it has nothing to do with Pinterest.
> Pinterest, it should be noted, doesn’t cost anything to sign up for. But as the old internet maxim goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.’” Meanwhile, people who do use the service complain that the resolution of Pinterest images is often low.
It's annoying to make an account, but they are paying to host the image. That you want a particular image is already tracked by the other image hosts. It does not seem like a net loss of privacy.
One possibility is that Pinterest is really actually very popular and the people who reasonably hate the awful site are in the minority (which sucks for us but it's hard to be critical of their images coming up often). The other possibility is everyone hates Pinterest and Google is allowing their search to get gamed - and in that case the ball seems in Google's court? Like, your users hate your search, fix it.
Either way it seems like yelling at Pinterest for "ruining" photo search in one particular way is silly. They have either been so successful as to redefine how people want to access images or they're cheating.
They clearly don't give a shit about this problem. Similar issues with Giphy & friends. If they cared they'd de-list sites that present different data to a real user than they do to the Google bot, so that all image search results are directly accessible.
Like other bad Google behavior related to controlling web spam, I reckon this drives more people to see Google ads on these sorts of sites, so they've taken an anti-user position. Same reason much of the "legitimate" web turned up in Google results now looks like a low effort click farm—if the clicks are making Google money, who cares if it's coming from garbage content?
Couldn't agree more about the final sentence. Searching for almost anything (how to guides and recipes are the most obvious examples) returns a SERP of utter rubbish, all clearly designed to farm SEO and clicks. This seems to be what Google wants and desires, because it keeps getting worse.
Agreed. These days it seems in all of my Google searches, after the first third of a page of results, everything is dominated by garbage pages on (presumably) hacked sites filled with SEO bait. They're so obviously gaming the system, I can only presume Google is intentionally looking the other way.
Alternatively, maybe they do give a shit, but it's easier for 10,000+ companies to hack your SEO than it is for 10,000+ employees to come up with a way to mitigate it.
>If they cared they'd de-list sites that present different data to a real user than they do to the Google bot
I'm sure they used to do exactly this. Now, not only do they not do this, but they commit the same sin themselves! Recently I was clicking around Google Images looking for some chart data when I found a promising Google Docs link. Alas, "you must sign in to access this document". Get bent, Google.
Non evidence based conspiracy incoming - how much do you wanna bet there are some individuals who personally profit/profited from Pinterest's success who made these decisions?
Pinterest is a walled garden. It nearly wants the data hoarder in me to scrape it using a bespoke script and dump the scraped images on some darkweb forum for a small fee.
The images there all came from somewhere else and are mostly uncredited on pinterest, so that's not really advantageous to anyone, and doesn't really harm pinterest at all.
I have a chrome extension called "unpinterested" that adds -site:pinterest.* to all of my google searches. It's effectively solved lots of the pinterest problems.
The real issue of course is that google is once again tolerating a site that allows indexing but won't allow linking to the actual content (used to be a problem with experts exchange IIR). Instead pinterest redirects to their page instead of the image.
Ugh, Pinterest is the experts-exchange of images. But there's a very straightforward way for Google to deal with Pinterext, and Medium, and Quora, and sign-up-only newspapers and magazines. Google just needs a preferences checkbox that says "Remove all sites which present themselves differently if they know GoogleBot is accessing them."
Yeah, why not? Index every page twice. If the non-bot result is materially different, rank the site lower. If the site is not accessible as a regular user, remove it from results entirely.
Obviously. This is not some technical marvel we're talking about. Google already tells you how to verify the site visitor is Googlebot[1], practically telling the world how to do cloaking. Google employees know Quora, Pinterest, etc. are gaming their system. This has nothing to do with trivial technical solutions and everything to do with business incentives.
Sorry, but that's putting a heck of a lot of trust/faith/expectations in G actually paying attention to said feedback from said system. Expecting G to self police is just a non-starter as we clearly see people getting away with things now. Self-policing never works.
if you use ublock origin, you can permanently remove pinterest results in google images with the following filter:
www.google.com##.isv-r:has-text(/pinterest.com/)
shameless plug: i've been maintaining a browser extension for a couple of years called 'google images restored' [0] which reverts google images to how it was before 2019. that extension, mixed with the ublock origin filter removing unwanted domains (pinterest, alamy, 123rf, etc), makes google images enjoyable again for me.
I may be misremembering, but I am quietly confident that about 15 years ago I could instruct google to remember a list of sites that I wanted excluded from any of my search results.
I definitely recall that up until about 10 years ago ebay had a similar feature, where I could define various vendors that I wanted to exclude forever after.
Ebay has the two-master problem in spades, of course, but removing these types of features is an especially non-subtle reminder that as a consumer you're very low down on the corporation's care list.
Having to manually modify all my search queries forever more is an offensive cognitive burden.
You remember just fine, and probably got it to within a year or two. If google wanted to make money off something other than the ads I never click (if they even managed to be displayed): bring back the list, and name a reasonable price.
Because even though Pinterest will never resolve on our home network (lest you accidentally click a search result), there's no way I can find to not display those results to begin with. We need a Pi-Hole for search results.
If someone built a google scraper that ran that second query in I'm Feeling Lucky mode and just injected that image in place of any pinterest ones - I wonder how quickly they'd rise to internet prominence.
A couple of years ago, Pinterest had hacked Google's SEO so completely that they polluted even my non-image search results. Fortunately this is no longer the case.
The way to fix this, along with most issues I see in modern web search, is for search engines to penalize SEO swindling heavily instead of rewarding it. I dare say it's one of the most destructive and terrible aspects of ad tech.
Why would Pinterest want to do this? Of course they want the traffic. Pinterest are actually doing nothing wrong here, IMO. They are simply exposing their HTML to the world and Google is coming along and deciding to index it in their own way.
Forgive me, for I have become the Hacker News curmudgeon and armchair-know-it-all.
Subject matter aside, this piece's journalism brought me much ire.
Did they really need Pinterest's failed acquisition to contextualize this article? It's not even discussed save for a throwaway comment at the end. Pinterest has been an annoyance to image searchers for a long time, are they suggesting that somehow PayPal didn't know, and upon discovery they too concluded, "Pinterest sucks and it has utterly ruined photo searching on the internet."
Is a HN thread with 24 upvotes now a means of "pleading" with Google engineers [0]?
Am I just getting mad at a low-quality, click-baity online magazine?
Every site that presents content to search indexing bots, but requires a signup by actual users should be shunned into irrelevancy on the spot. This seems like such shitty behavior that the response to nuke from orbit seems like a no-brainer, I'm not sure why it isn't the default.
They should be shunned by Google itself. Search engines have an actual rule against this. Apparently it's called cloaking: feeding bots one page and users another. It obviously leads to unhappy users who expected one thing and got another.
I thought Google already had a rule about something like this, that they'd delist your site entirely for breaking. I wonder whether there's a loophole, or if they're just choosing to look the other way here.
I’m curious as to why Google accommodates Pinterest - as far as I know they run their own ads and don’t use Google’s ad network, so I’m not sure what benefit Google gets?
You're probably thinking of the "First Click Free" program, which was intended mainly for news sites, and required those sites to present users with the full content of an article if they arrived on it by clicking on a Google result. This prevented sites from hitting users with a paywall/signup page immediately.
Sadly, Google weakened this principle in 2015 and abandoned it entirely in 2017:
I don't know. This is a difficult balance. If I'm searching for some information I would rather know that it exists behind a paywall and that I can have it if I pay, than not know that it exists at all. As a consumer I want the choice.
They're already doing such things, and have been since the beginning. It's a standard quality monitoring and tuning of the ranking algorithm. Google even has (outsourced) staff that continuously performs searches and gives feedback. Sites that Google doesn't deem appropriate for their search results are regularly removed both algorithmically and via manual interventions.
There's no objective ranking. Every algorithm change is effectively Google's decision against someone's site.
Google has been caught abusing this responsibility with preferential treatment of AMP pages, due to AMP giving preferential treatment to Google's ads. Google knows Pinterest is blatantly spamming search, so they must have a reason for keeping them.
If it specifically targets Pinterest then maybe. But if they write a general rule (say, penalizing sites that require a login before displaying content I'm looking at you Quora...), or add additional features like perm-blacklisting sites or display more varied image results like Bing/Yandex, that'd get around most anticompetitive accusations
Is there a right to expect honest behaviour in so much as Google will return results which are uncensored and where obvious rule breakers (Google's own rules, that is) are dealt with accordingly?
No, I don't think so - assuming they had user feedback to back up their decision. It's sort of similar to a convienence store specifically stopping stocking of Nestle brand waters over customer complaints.
It'd be a lot safer of them to just ban the behavior though and create a rule.
Sure, I can see that maybe if it's your best vendor and their product makes you a lot of money you can tolerate some poop on the floor occasionally...
...but if you decide to ban them I don't think anyone would ever consider it an "abuse of power" would they? Your service came with an element that's detrimental to my own... that seems like reasonable grounds for a ban.
I think this starts to approach conversations about how big is "too big." If a company or product is so large that a simple ban for bad behavior can be considered "abuse of power" then maybe that product represents too much of the market.
Pinterest seems like such a squandered opportunity to me. It’s classic short term thinking vs long term vision.
I basically ignore any Pinterest links because they’re just shoe pages and a login trap driven by mindlessly chasing engagement metrics.
It’s Experts Exchange that was wiped out by Stack Overflow.
The costs of this should be low. If YouTube can host videos basically for free and without forcing you to login, Pinterest can host a free links and images.
Make your site easy to use and a C pleasure to use and you build long term loyalty, behavior and engagement. The way they’re doing it screams of bad product management where engagement inevitably drops and any number of external factors will be blamed. Google downranking, competition, Facebook/Instagram, whatever. Never any internal failure.
Since we're on the subject of pinterest, do their users get some mileage out of the social features as opposed to just downloading e.g. PureRef and creating a locally hosted board? Serious question, I don't quite understand what they're offering.
BS. This can be solved by how to design the UX among other ways. This problem is not equal over search engines as well. There are other things that annoys me more like Google and the problems with N-Grams.
little addendum: total domination Google Search on market (91,7% by Statcounter) is a cause for not spending too much money on search quality
Web Search — very expensive product. If you have market share 90%+ you have not motivation to spend more money on quality. But you have direct reasons (shareholders) to spend less money on quality.
Flickr has always done the same in my experience. Any attempt at viewing the source image always resulted in a redirect to Flickr's shitty landing page.
Currently Flickr overrides right click with a zoom 'feature.'
Fortunately however - depending on the license - you can trivially download various sizes of images (including "original") with a click, using Flickr's context menu to choose between the image sizes. That seems like a reasonable approach.
With a few very rare exceptions - the content is always available at a higher resolution and more easily accessible at a different site. Pinterest is just a blackhole that photos go to to die.
doing site:pinterest.com or .co.uk. or .ca can be useful because then you can search through the entire album after finding a relevant result on google
For each result you can see multiple pages that include the image. It also shows the resolution and file size of each version. I did a test search for "bear" and clicked on the first result. It showed 14 different pages containing the same image with different sizes and possibly slightly different crops. You can also select a subsection of the image to search for that.
It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior.
I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content. This is a failing of Google image search for not showing alternate matches for the same image.
Bing has it figured out. I can't tell if Google just doesn't care enough about image search to implement it, or if there's some obscure patent preventing them from doing so.