15 ms·

“Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

• zerostar07 9y ago
  Along with istockphoto and the majority of stock photo sites for deceptively using the word "free".
• CM30 9y ago
  It should, but this also illustrates a problem with Google Search that they'll need to grapple with in the future. Namely, that while they should treat all sites equally, in practicality there's not really much incentive to on their part. Think about it. Let's say Google does remove Pinterest altogether, banning the site as a punishment for 'gaming' the system. What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken. They won't know Google banned the site or what for, they'll just think 'Pinterest should be coming up, it isn't, so Google is broken'. And I suspect that underpins a lot of instances where Google gives larger more popular sites and services a slap on the wrist for using black hat SEO. Google knows that if they really did treat them 'equally', then the average Joe would think Google's search engine was a broken mess because it doesn't bring up what they expect it to. However, on the flip side by not banning them or punishing them, you get stuff like this where it seems like large sites are allowed to break rules with impunity and smaller ones are hit with the banhammer for a single offence. It's an interesting conundrum.
  • raquo 9y ago
    Which is why they should have done it before Pinterest got so big in the first place. And honestly I don't think any significant amount of people search Google images wanting Pinterest results. People want images, they don't care where they're from. AFAIK there is almost no OC on Pinterest anyway.
    • csydas 9y ago
      > And honestly I don't think any significant amount of people search Google images wanting Pinterest results. Sure they do, if the picture on Pinterest is relevant to the search term; they wouldn't have clicked on the thumbnail if it wasn't close to (or exactly) what they were looking for. The issue isn't that people don't want Pinterest, it's that they don't want the closed nature of Pinterest, and even then, it's less an issue with Pinterest and more just a closed web problem in general. Consider certain IT vendors who won't even let you look at their documentation without being a current customer or handing actual information over to a Sales Rep and having it verified, or forums that hide their content behind logins or paywalls. Pinterest is a big target because it's big and has a lot of artsy stuff that might be useful for a simple project, but you can replace Pinterest with dozens of sites and the same rants would apply. The Reddit post to me feels like it's railing against an easy target rather than the actual problem of a consistently closed web with absurd demands for access.
      • raquo 9y ago
        Almost all the images on Pinterest are available elsewhere. If Pinterest results were not polluting Google images, the originals would surface easier. --- I don't really see a problem with targeting the biggest worst abuser. Not everything has to be a one-shot solution to grand problems.
        • dazc 9y ago
          '...the originals would surface easier' Yes, exactly. Try and find the original version of most images these days and you'll just go around in circles. If Google really think Pinterest need to be in search results (I'm talking text based queries here) why on Earth do they need to return 3 results on page one, all leading to a Pinterest log-in page?
          • hokus 9y ago
            should replace the result~~s~~ with login/register links.
    • dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
      >AFAIK there is almost no OC on Pinterest anyway. And this is the key point. By removing Pinterest from the search results the user doesn't lose almost anything.
      • toomuchtodo 9y ago
        This brings up a great point. Why does Google not just extract whatever information Pinterest is providing and provide that directly in Google Images as SERP? If none of the content in Pinterest is original, what value are they providing the user? Pinterest is the "experts-exchange.com" of digital imagery, except EE at least had (gated) original content.
        • always_good 9y ago
          Pinterest (re)hosts the images so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. That Google write custom logic that supposedly unrolls this indirection on this one site where the image sources already exist on other sites?
          • toomuchtodo 9y ago
            Is that farfetched? Does Google not have the engineering resources to detect the image canonical source (a la Tin Eye) and point to that instead? I find that hard to believe considering the resources they’ve put into Content ID at YouTube for copyright infringement identification and takedowns.
            • deleted 9y ago
              [deleted]
            • hokus 9y ago
              The website the image was stripped from isn't even indexed. But well put: If google wants to pretend it is quality material because it sits on a giant content farm they should indeed credit the original source for it. If they cant find it it should not be listed. If it was text the entire content farm would be erased from the index indefinitely.
    • huac 9y ago
      > People want images, they don't care where they're from. Right, which doesn't align with the incentives which push Google to follow copyright law.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • autokad 9y ago
      > And honestly I don't think any significant amount of people search Google images wanting Pinterest results. My guess is, Since search is Google's wheel house, they had this discussion, looked at the data, and found that many users do want it in their results. Anecdotally, I myself dont care. Most of my image searches are to get an understanding what I am looking for. Some number north of 90% of the time, I dont click the images
  • twblalock 9y ago
    What rules is Pinterest breaking? And what would it mean for Google to treat "all sites equally"?
    • bambax 9y ago
      Please read the link before commenting!
      • twblalock 9y ago
        Don't assume people didn't read the link. It's against the guidelines here and frankly it's insulting. People can read the same article and still have different opinions.
        • Firerouge 9y ago
          The third sentence explicitly states what rule Pinterest breaks....
          • twblalock 9y ago
            That's not one of Google's rules, as far as I can tell. Here are some of Google's rules: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/open-web/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/open-we... Some might say that Pinterest's behavior is covered under the "Spam and Malware" section on that page, but clearly Google does not agree with that interpretation of Google's rules or else the search results would have been removed by now. There are other sites requiring logins that appear in Google results, e.g. LinkedIn, and Google clearly doesn't see that as a rule violation either. If that was really a rule, Google would need to block a lot of major news sites as well, e.g. NY Times, WSJ, FT, Economist, etc. I'll believe Google's interpretation of their own rules, rather than someone's interpretation on Reddit.
            • endorphone 9y ago
              Cloaking -- presenting different content to a search bot than you would a visitor -- is against Google's rules, and many sites have been removed over the years for that reason. That they aren't currently removed hardly demonstrates that they've assessed whether it's allowed or not, and is specious logic. If the search results lead to frustration -- and every pinterest result does -- that doesn't help Google. Ergo, those sites eventually get removed.
  • alasano 9y ago
    I would imagine that Google can approach Pinterest with a deadline. Take measures to ensure that visitors can see these images without an account after being linked to them, or lose x% of your traffic overnight.
  • AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
    remove them only from all search results that don't include the word pintrest. Search for pintrest, you get pintrest. Search for "widgets," pintrist is excluded. Search for "pintrist widgets," pintrist is included.
    • jacobolus 9y ago
      Or better, just demote them to the very end of the search results. Occasionally there might be images from Pinterest that are not found elsewhere on the internet. If someone wants to scroll the image SERP down to page 6 (or whatever) it doesn’t hurt to show them there.
    • vonseel 9y ago
      Pinterest. Not that spelling is important or anything.
  • paulcole 9y ago
    Google shouldn’t (and doesn’t) treat all sites equally. This has been the core of their business since day one.
  • huebnerob 9y ago
    I think you're looking at this in exactly the wrong way: Pinterest is already getting special treatment and it's positive special treatment. I think that any other site that didn't have the clout of Pinterest would get explicitly downranked for this kind of behavior if it became as apparent.
    • nothrabannosir 9y ago
      That’s exactly what op was saying.
      • refulgentis 9y ago
        No, it isn't.
    • alehul 9y ago
      That's the idea OP meant. Google lacks any incentive to screw with a site that has millions(?) of users, as it could have significant consequence, and so Pinterest gets away with what others wouldn't.
  • kps 9y ago
    Pinterest shouldn't need to be removed specifically — the fact that they (or any aggregator, including say Reddit) reference some image should be a signal that the referenced source is a more valuable search result. (I think there used to be search engine that used a method like that.)
    • kevincox 9y ago
      I think Reddit is different. Reddit often has valuable commentary that can be more relevant then the linked content. However I agree that Pintrest shouldn't be removed specifically. Sites that don't display any useful content to the user should be removed.
  • xg15 9y ago
    > What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken. Would that be a problem for Google (or anyone else)? If a group of users specifically expects the results to come from Pinterest, they'd presumably be able to search on that site directly. For other searches, they'd presumably still use Google because there is no good alternative. Additionally, as the reddit comment notes, the pinterest search results are technically against google's policies anyway as they require a login to be useful.
    • delinka 9y ago
      "...search on that site directly." Not for an unbelievable number of people (according to my own anecdata.) There exist large numbers (extrapolating from aforementioned anecdata) of people who don't know you can just visit a website - they think it must first be "googled." I've witnessed on a single occasion an individual who accidentally went directly to facebook.com, didn't trust that they'd gotten facebook.com, proceeded to Google, entered 'facebook.com' in the search box, then selected the site from the search results. I suspect (intuition via anecdata...) that much of the Pinterest's target audience has similar levels of technical awareness and ability.
      • xg15 9y ago
        Even then the suggestion further down this thread could work: include pinterest results only if the search query contains the word "pinterest". If people then still complain because they expect google to read their mind and provide pinterest results for completely unrelated queries, I honestly don't have much compassion for them. (Though if google wanted to, they could even make allowances for those people via profiling - e.g., if you know user X has clicked on many pinterest results in the past, always permit those results in their queries.)
        • hungerstrike 9y ago
          It almost seems like Google can read your mind at times. They should already know whether somebody is a heavy Pinterest user or not.
  • Waterluvian 9y ago
    "Show auto-filtered results"
  • mung 9y ago
    I don't know what the problem is with implementing opt-in community block lists. This gives blocking functionality, and offloads the responsibility to communities that users can subscribe to.
  • Erlangolem 9y ago
    What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken. They won't know Google banned the site or what for, they'll just think 'Pinterest should be coming up, it isn't, so Google is broken'. A problem that can be solved with a single line, “Pinterest results not included for x reasons” is no problem.
  • viraptor 9y ago
    > Let's say Google does remove Pinterest altogether, banning the site as a punishment for 'gaming' the system. > What then? Pinterest takes 2 days to write some code and start showing us the content that Google indexes and fixes the complaint. They start complying with the same rules that apply to us, get indexed properly, and everybody's happy. It's not like Pinterest is set in stone and we can never change what it does.
  • elgenie 9y ago
    It's actually the problem that Google would've had to grapple with in the past when facing off against AltaVista/Lycos/WebCrawler et al holding a measly 5% market share. Google traffic is way way way way more important to Pinterest than Pinterest is to Google search results, and the power flows accordingly. Nobody is switching to Bing for Pinterest image results.
  • Aditya_Garg 9y ago
    Google has removed large sites in the past. The one that comes to mind is RapGenius a couple of years back
  • nialv7 9y ago
    > What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken. Also, this is censorship. You can say _this_ censorship is good just because it censors something you don't like.
    • pjc50 9y ago
      Google has done this kind of ranking adjustment for _years_. It's necessary in order to make sure the search results are relevant rather than hundreds of pages of SEO spam.
• lupinglade 9y ago
  Have to agree. Pinterest is a cancer to the Internet.
• twblalock 9y ago
  I don't see the problem here. The most popular sites are showing up in search results. Pinterest is a popular site. It seems like that's the way search engines are supposed to work. If you don't like the fact that Pinterest is a popular site, fair enough -- but that's a personal opinion, and it's not a good enough reason for Google or any other search engine to suppress Pinterest images in search results.
  • bambax 9y ago
    > I don't see the problem ... because you didn't read the description of the problem on the Reddit post.
    • twblalock 9y ago
      I read it. I still don't see the problem. A popular site ranks highly in search results.
      • minimaxir 9y ago
        "Everyone of these results requires a signup and log into Pinterest to be able to see it" is a problem.
        • twblalock 9y ago
          Why? The image is visible in the search results. You search for images, you see images. What requires a signup is the Pinterest-specific content associated with the image.
          • minimaxir 9y ago
            [EDIT: nvm]
            • twblalock 9y ago
              > Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO. They clutter the images results and do not allow users to obtain what they search for. Sounds like they are to me. It's not explicitly stated either way, but when people talk about "image results" it seems safe to assume they are taking about Google Image Search.
• gt_ 9y ago
  I haven’t had any of these problems while using DuckDuckGo.com
  • thraway180306 9y ago
    Yeah, I've been sporadically trying them out for many many years and never lasted a week, until last year. I use DDG exclusively since half a year now and rarely even feel compelled to use !g google redirect. Congrats @yegg and the team!
    • eecks 9y ago
      I tried the same but I still find myself using !g all the time when I really want to find something.
  • zerostar07 9y ago
    bing images or yandex images have less spam imho
  • DanBC 9y ago
    I love DDG, but 1) there are plenty of Pinterest results in DDG image searches. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ibm+leapfrog&t=ffab&atb=v100-3&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ibm+leapfrog&t=ffab&atb=v100-3&iax... 2) there are plenty of irrelevant results in the image search (above [IBM leapfrog] returns many that aren't about the IBM leapfrog) 3) You have to clicky each image to bring up the card to find out what site it's pointing too. The site isn't shown in the status bar when you hover on the image link. Two of these links go to Pinterest: https://imgur.com/a/aLe1K https://imgur.com/a/aLe1K
• blakesterz 9y ago
  > "I'm searching for a specific piece of technical hardware " What specific piece of technical hardware shows up anywhere near the first page of results in Google that's from pintrest? I can't think of a single time I've seen pintrest in the search results and I search for various technical things all the time? Just curious since this surprises me. I thought pintrest was non technical stuff usually.
  • bradford 9y ago
    I'm a hobbyist woodworker. I was recently searching for an unusual wood-joint, and I had to give up because the google search results were absolutely polluted with pinterest.
    • bootlooped 9y ago
      Did you try using search operators? unusual wood joint -pinterest.com - searches google for "unusual wood joint" minus any results from pinterest.com
      • Whitestrake 9y ago
        Try `-site:pinterest.com` to remove any results from the website, rather than any results that contain the text "pinterest.com". A minor distinction, but one that could change your results slightly.
      • Springtime 9y ago
        There have been occasions while trying to filter results from reverse image searches where excluding both Pinterest strings and domains had no effect in my experience. (There's also the problem of Google not searching for a specific string when even double quoted but that's a different one of the search engine's annoying quirks of late).
    • blakesterz 9y ago
      Interesting! Good answer, thanks :-)
    • 9y ago
• jws 9y ago
  In days of old it was pretty easy to ban a site from your Google search results. It looks like they have removed that function. I wonder why? I know I liked having certain low value (to me) sites not clutter up my results. A little article about the feature, sorry it is going to try to throw an interrupting DIV at you– https://searchengineland.com/google-block-sites-feature-146409 https://searchengineland.com/google-block-sites-feature-1464...
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • ValentineC 9y ago
    It's in the article you linked to, but I suppose Google expects everyone to use their Personal Blocklist Chrome extension now: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
    • aerique 9y ago
      Ah, so they removed it to peddle their Chrome browser.
      • callumlocke 9y ago
        This kind of extension is available for every browser.
        • nasredin 9y ago
          They are usually broken because Google often pushes shady obfuscated updates. IIRC the OFFICIAL "Personal Blocklist" was broken for a long time due to this. AFAIK there's still no way to block entire TLDs. So basically Google doesn't give a shit about you!
    • ttsda 9y ago
      It seems the extension is only half-working. The "Block foo.com" links don't appear in the search result anymore, but if I visit the website and block it through the extension pop-up they are then eliminated from the search results in future searches.
• TomK32 9y ago
  I have an filter to hide pinterest from my image search results. All the white space, it's fantastic.
  • TomK32 9y ago
    for ublock origin it's `##a[href*="pinimg"]` to filter on google image search.
  • vit05 9y ago
    But google offers the option to put a minus signal before the name of the site you do not want receive results from. Is a filter better than this? search: concrete+houses -pinterest
    • TomK32 9y ago
      My filter is part of the adblocker and kicks in every single time. That's way better, no need to remember adding it.
• Gustomaximus 9y ago
  To me the simplest solution would be to add 'Stop showing domain' in the drop down arrow under where they currently have 'Cached' in search results. It would be useful to users and also help Google understand when a site is annoying a bunch of people. ...Or is this an opportunity for an extension someone wants ot build where you can select sites/domains and it auto injects somnething like -site:pintrest.com into all searches.
  • satbyy 9y ago
    There is Google's own "Personal blocklist" extension that does exactly that https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
    • Oishikatta 9y ago
      It doesn't actually. The problem with Pinterest is in image results - the extension does nothing for them. Second, the extension no longer works properly as it hasn't been updated in years.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• shiado 9y ago
  While they are at it please remove LinkedIn. You can't actually view anything on any page without logging in. Why is it listed at all? Seems pretty deceptive to me.
  • icc97 9y ago
    Can we also ban Elsevier and get Google to replace their links with Sci-Hub links?
    • YawningAngel 9y ago
      ScienceDirect articles shouldn't be indexed unless they have a readable abstract. I realise that isn't quite where you're going though ;)
    • fragmede 9y ago
      On the version of Internet from the 90's? Totally. Could anything like that happen on the CommerceNet, post EME (Encrypted Media Extensions)? (Sept, 2017) Hardly. (And your name is now on a list for suggesting something so subersive, citizen.)
      • jkaplowitz 9y ago
        Google didn't exist on the version of the Internet from most of the 90's. :)
        • qbrass 9y ago
          Those few years of overlap were epic.
    • oh_sigh 9y ago
      Fairly sure google isn't going to promote pirated content over above-board content, regardless of how a large part of the community feels about it.
  • coatmatter 9y ago
• ppbutt 9y ago
  Monopoly and complacent governements
• ajnin 9y ago
  I agree that it's quite annoying, but you can already remove it yourself from the search results by adding "-site:pinterest.com" in the query.
  • omnimus 9y ago
    Will this allow different service to get into same space and then we will do "-site:pinterest.com -site:random.com"? Maybe than there will be space for new search engine that will do it for us?
  • roselan 9y ago
    I don't want to do that each time, plus pininterset.in or .br will takes it's place.
    • looperhacks 9y ago
      You can use pinterest.
    • latexr 9y ago
      Do `-site:pinterest.*` to block all domains. But I agree, I also don’t want to have to do that every time.
• xg15 9y ago
  Some people in this thread are comparing the situation to that of news site paywalls and noting the recent change in google image search. I think there is something to the comparison and it highlights the fundamentally different opinions about the purpose of a search engine: Users want a search engine to find information they are looking for. Businesses and sites want a search engine to advertise which information they could provide - but not lead directly to the pieces of information in question. I think it's worth to make this divide visible and start a discussion which kind of search engine we'd like to have.
• hapnin 9y ago
  Adding -site:pinterest.* to the search works too.
• anfilt 9y ago
  Just use -site:pinterest.com Problem solved
• mrsteveman1 9y ago
  They seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to insert themselves between the site users visited intentionally to find what they were looking for (Google), and the site that actually provided what they were looking for. They've essentially become a large MITM attack on Google Image results. Edit: just tried a few arbitrary search strings on Google Images, it seems improved compared to the past few weeks/months, somewhat. For some searches, Pinterest results didn't appear at all. For "esp8266 enclosure", only 1 out of 15 on the "front page" points to Pinterest, but the original image is still from Tindie, not Pinterest. The person who supposedly pinned that image describes themselves as "Creative Digital Marketing, Web designer, WebDev, crazy SEO". Ok, maybe a real pin from a real person, maybe. Then I decided to see what happens with a handful of more "NSFW" search terms. The number of Pinterest results varied but significantly increased overall. For some terms, in the 3 rows of images visible without scrolling, there were 19 images, and 11 of them (57%) pointed to Pinterest. None of them were images originally posted on Pinterest, they all have a hover link to the original site. However, even though Pinterest is providing a link to the original site on top of the image, clicking it doesn't always take you there. A good bit of the time, Pinterest has chosen to redirect you to a "blocked site" page instead, and only after they have already displayed an image from a site that they deemed "inappropriate". And then shortly afterward a giant popup prompting the user to login or create an account filled the screen. [1] (safe for work) https://i.imgur.com/XuOvwvi.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XuOvwvi.jpg
  • stevekemp 9y ago
    Search for things like "Acorn Tattoo", and similar terms and you find pinterest spam is all there is in the google image search results. Their behavior is eerily reminiscent of expertsexchange, back in the day. They had a similar high ranking for lots of things, but the result-pages were all horrid and non-useful to actual visitors. Happily stackexchange surpassed expertsexchange, and I hope that something comes to kick pinterest from its niche too - one of only two sites I wish to fail (the other being linkedin, for similar evil reasons).
  • mrsteveman1 9y ago
    Replying to myself after doing some additional testing. I've now seen multiple examples of Pinterest hosting images with the "original link" being a Google Images search result page, complete with the huge URL query string intact. While it's possible users who don't know how to find the original URL for an image are pinning Google Image pages instead, the accounts that have pinned them do not look like real people. It really makes it look like Pinterest is crawling Google Images for specific search terms, auto-generating pages to match the results, and then manipulating Google to get their own pages to show up in Google instead.
• joshu 9y ago
  I search for a lot of DIY stuff and frequently the image search results are on pinterest. Often the underlying link is shown as pinterest and not the original link (presumably because someone saved it from pinterest instead?) and I can't figure out the fucking original site. Pinterest in search results is awful garbage, it seems.
• logicallee 9y ago
  as a workaround, if you get very polluted results on a particular Google search, you can add the search term "-site:pinterest.com" without quotation marks to your query, thereby narrowly excluding it.
• marban 9y ago
  Same could/should be said about Lyst when it comes to fashion.
• underwater 9y ago
  I used to use Pinterest regularly. It was a good way to capture ideas and share them with others. Now I cringe whenever I accidentally click on a Pinterest link. The product is dead to me, there is zero chance I'd ever willingly install or open the app. It's strange to see what was originally a useful tool turn into well-funded SEO spam.
• JohnTHaller 9y ago
  While they're at it please remove Yelp. The page that comes up on mobile does not appear to be the one Google indexes. It only shows the first sentence of a few reviews. Clicking Read More or More Reviews bounces you straight to the Google Play Store to install the Yelp app.
  • teddyfrozevelt 9y ago
    If they did this, they would get slammed with lawsuits considering their own rating system competes with Yelp.
    • yellowapple 9y ago
      I suspect if Yelp clearly runs afoul of Google's policies (and "don't compete with Google" is not one of those policies) and the page rank demotions are explicitly documented to be because of chronic violations of such policies, then such lawsuits would be uphill battles at best.
  • csmiller 9y ago
    Yelp has some of the worst practices in the industry. Quora at least shows you some of what you want, while Yelp will stop at nothing to force you to log in and/or download the app.
• vbezhenar 9y ago
  I always thought that presenting different content for Google Search Bot and users is bannable offence. Not so much for big businesses, it seems.
  • adventured 9y ago
    That's correct, it is for normal sites. At a minimum it will get you a dramatic downranking that will practically remove all of your content from Google. LinkedIn and Quora are both protected from those rules for example, as with Pinterest. It's Silicon Valley back scratching. It's also a very clear abuse of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, in my opinion. As anti-trust moves in on Google in the coming years, this should be held up as one of many examples of persistent market abuse and consumer harm (anti-competitive behavior, using the monopoly to restrict consumer choice).
• staunch 9y ago
  It's just not good for the world that a single company controls a basic fundamental function of the internet. It needs fixing. Google Search needs to be replaced by an open source decentralized system. And then users themselves can control which sites do well and which don't.
• RandyRanderson 9y ago
  Here's what I use to remove bad results: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
  • cjg 9y ago
    Unfortunately it doesn't work on image searches.
• SeanBoocock 9y ago
  A complicating factor in all of this is the unfolding anti-trust cases against Google and other large digital platforms (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...). Choices that Google might have once made to improve search results for users are now under extra regulatory scrutiny. I imagine Google executives would be very careful about making any moves that could be cast as freezing out competition, even if that competition is abusing Google's platform.
• paradroid 9y ago
  LinkedIn requires logging in because the Supreme Court rules they couldn't really stop us from scraping public profiles. Forcing us to login makes it easier for them to control who has access to what content.
  • otterley 9y ago
    IAAL. There's been no Supreme Court ruling on the matter, only a district court decision ruling that the CFAA can't be used to charge scrapers with a crime. And that case is currently being appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, case no. 17-16783).
    • paradroid 9y ago
      (thumbsup). But that's my overall take.
  • ckocagil 9y ago
    This makes no sense to me. Anyone willing to scrape a profile will create dummy accounts to do so. And even if this step somehow prevented data scraping, the network effect will make it extremely hard to compete with LinkedIn.
    • paradroid 9y ago
      It is much more difficult to pretend to be a real person with a real job and real employment and education history with real connections.
• nevster 9y ago
  It may be unrelated but what I find annoying is how pinch to zoom is so broken for Google image search using Safari on an iPhone.
• adrianmonk 9y ago
  I don't see why Pinterest does this to themselves. My main exposure to them is through Google image search and links to their site. So my first several experiences were like this. It left me with a terrible first impression. It makes me wonder if the whole site plays games and tries to waste my time. I usually don't sign up for an account the first few times I encounter a site, so in my mind it's a pretty critical time to make a good impression. Instead they annoyed me so much I've practically decided never to create an account.
  • wpietri 9y ago
    One of the things that makes me a little bonkers is when people A/B test, find something that works well for, say, 50% of the people, and then dust off their hands and call it done. Because 50% is a lot of people, so it must be good. I'd rather that they ask, "Hey, is there something that would be good for the other half of the users?" Software being infinitely soft, we can often find ways to serve both groups. If Pinterest were a person, we'd think it an asshole, always pulling a bait-and-switch and asking us to create an account in the same brusque way. How much would it really cost them to be more neighborly?
    • muzani 9y ago
      I had friends in Groupon who used this technique. They claimed that forced sign ups didn't really result in a high enough bounce rate, compared to the number of sign ups they got. Data driven does a poor job of capturing user annoyance. Someone will tolerate being screwed a few times to get a discount. But after a while, it builds momentum. Though in many cases, startups don't care. They just want to sell off their numbers and exit.
    • LeifCarrotson 9y ago
      50% is overselling the success rate of login-walls from Google Images by a lot - probably multiple orders of magnitude. And I think you're significantly misrepresenting the A/B test's goal. It's not to find what works best for the most people, it's to find what works best for the company running the test. If a login wall causes an account creation from 0.5% of people presented with the bait-and-switch, that's not compared to a 99.5% failure rate. It's contrasted with an account creation from 0.1% of people presented with the image they wanted with a "Click here to create an account" prompt in the corner, and it's five times as effective as that alternative. The same story gets repeated here over and over again regarding the email newsletter sign-up form that steals focus halfway through a blog post. Yes, they increase your traceable readership more than anything else you could put in your blog (again, counting 1% vs 0.1%) . But there is a large percentage of the population who will close your blog permanently if you use them.
• intrasight 9y ago
  All my google images searches now include "-pinterest". This has only recently been necessary. Why?
  • ckocagil 9y ago
    Perhaps you need this? https://openuserjs.org/scripts/laidbacktempo/Google_View_Image https://openuserjs.org/scripts/laidbacktempo/Google_View_Ima...
• racer-v 9y ago
  When I get a Pinterest login popup, I just click the button at the bottom that says "Not now". Then I can browse the images.
• ckocagil 9y ago
  Quora too, please.
  • Depllo 9y ago
    What's the issue with Quora?
• hungerstrike 9y ago
  I hate this business model of using your audience to steal other sites content. Why doesn't Google link directly to the source of the content instead of Pinterest anyway? Maybe they don't care; they did invent AMP, which has some parallels with the way Pinterest works. Anyway, when I started using DuckDuckGo on my phone to get away from AMP - I noticed that whenever I search for recipes on DuckDuckGo - they generally link to a site called Yummly which is even worse than Pinterest. Please complain to DDG about this if you care! And speaking of searching on my phone, Apple won't even let me change the search engine string to use "encrypted.google.com" which would have gotten me Google results without the awful AMP links. My point in rambling on about all these different topics is that none of these asshole corporations seem to want to let me have control over anything. I don't want to live like this. Generally, when I get annoyed, I just stop playing their game. At this point I have stopped watching TV and I have left Facebook, Twitter and Reddit and I hope that you do too.
  • bornonline1 9y ago
    I agree with you. You have to log in to every single website for the 'personalization sake'. I hate personalization and the login.
• scottmcdot 9y ago
  A few weeks ago I shared something very similar from r/Showerthoughts [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16220638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16220638
  • exodust 9y ago
    That's a good exchange between user 'jquery' from Pinterest, assuming they're who they say they are, and user 'xg15'. Nice work raising the issue of nag screen and non-dismissable modal.
• WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
  I say don't get rid of it but give me the option to remove it from my search. There's a bunch of sites I would rather not see in my search all the time. Yes, I know I can do a custom search but I'd be happy to have a "not see x domain in my search" option. If I remember right there were other search engines in the past that had the option. Come on Google give me the option.
  • bagacrap 9y ago
    From the Reddit comments: This extension can block domains from Google search and it's made by Google. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
    • WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
      good tip thx!
    • cjg 9y ago
      Unfortunately it doesn't work on image searches.
• olefoo 9y ago
  Googlers with the power to change things; if you're reading this you will make many people happy and return utility to google searches that currently end up with captive images and no context.
• Pxtl 9y ago
  The most infuriating case is the reverse-image search. When I use reverse search for an image I'm trying to find a source or a complete version or context for an image flying about on social media. And what I get is often a solid wall of Pinterest hits providing zero info.
  • jaclaz 9y ago
    >The most infuriating case is the reverse-image search. Exactly, that is also in my experience when it is the most frustrating. On "normal" searches (let's say searching for an electronic device of some kind, hoping to find the manufacturer/support/specs) what I find increasingly disturbing is the number of links for Amazon offerings.
• JackFr 9y ago
  And the worst part is, I don't even understand WTF Pinterest is.
• walid 9y ago
  I have an account on Pinterest because I like the service but having to sign-in for the simplest of things surely bugs me. Sometimes I just want to see one image and I end up having to navigate a bunch of sign-in pages just to see something. Recently I've found myself skipping Pinterest pages just because of the hoop jumping that signing-in creates.
• feelin_googley 9y ago
  Someone gave an example of searching for "IBM Leapfrog" and getting numerous Pinterest results. I tried that search and only got one Pinterest result in the top 10. I had no problem getting the text and images using a text-only browser. Could Javascript be the enabler for this Pinterest/Google annoyance? Here is a quick little script to dump all the text from a Pinterest page; note how much is devoted to SEO and ads. .jpg URLs are wrapped in anchor tags for convenience. curl https://www.pinterest.com/pin/509469776569152019/ \ |exec tr '<' '\12' \ |exec sed 's/, \"/\ \"/g;s/{/\ /g;s/}/\ /g;s/\[/\ /g;s/\]/\ /g;/\":/!d' \ |exec sed '/ \"/!d;2s/^/<pre>/; /\.jpg\"/{s/\"/<\/pre><a href=\"/3; s/\"/\" style=margin:40px >viewjpg<\/a><pre>/4;}; $s/$/<\/pre>/' > 1.htm ; firefox file:///1.htm ; With respect to LinkedIn, here is an amusing experiment to test the theory that your time means nothing to some web developers: Try signing up for a temporary account with a 10-minute email address from 10minutemail.com. LinkedIn will not inform you that this is an unacceptable email address. LinkedIn will proceed to show you Google ReCaptchas for at least 10 minutes, and perhaps longer.
  • julianwachholz 9y ago
    Some throw away email sites accept incoming email on any domain, so if you have a spare one you can just point your MX record to the site and use that as a throwaway email. I believe most sites don't do DNS lookups when checking for scrap email addresses.
• danr4 9y ago
  Just A Bookmarklet that removes fixed elements like annoying signup overlays: javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()
• LawnDart1 9y ago
  So I'm probably not the only one who adds "-pinterest" to my searches. Never signing up for pinterest.
• inconvergent 9y ago
  Another way to look at it is that you need Pinterest results in google image search in order to help finding content on Pinterest that infringes your copyright.
• bringtheaction 9y ago
  Meanwhile perhaps the Personal Blocklist by Google ads-on for Chrome can help? Not sure if it works on image search also. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
  • jaclaz 9y ago
    Whether it works or not, if you think a bit about it, you need to use a google product (chrome) to correct a dis-service that google is making.
• whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  Been saying this myself for a while now and reporting Pintrest links when I can be bothered. Complete abuse of the system to use it as the top of their funnel and as usual people who advocate the service don't even realise it's doing this awful behaviour.
• thrownaway954 9y ago
  what i'll never understand is "why a wall?" why not just use a non-blocking banner at the bottom or top of the page? the only thing a wall does is piss people off since you are blocking the content that they came to see and it results in backlash like this? besides... isn't the whole pinterest model about getting exposure for the images that people post and getting people to sign up? i think that who ever is in charge needs to rethink what they are doing.
• squarefoot 9y ago
  There were some ways to block Pinterest continuous pestering for subscription, but it got annoying and rather than supporting a model I consider unfair to the users I removed them from my surfing list. It should also be noted that most problems I read on the commentary here would be easily solved if Google re-enabled the discussion filter they conveniently removed years ago to prevent users to filter out commercial sites from their queries. That move was pure evil and thanks to it searching has become harder than before. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/Psb6OmlLJTg https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/Psb... https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-18854.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...
• yalogin 9y ago
  How many users does pinterest have? Is it popular and still growing? Why are they not going public yet? I have never knowingly gone to Pinterest and so don’t know much about it.
• latexr 9y ago
  The way to exclude Pinterest from your search results, directly from the search box, is `-site:pinterest.`. It excludes all* Pinterest domains, but not other pages that mention it. But I agree Pinterest should be completely removed by default.
• tabtab 9y ago
  There's a problem bigger than Pinterest here: images AND any content that is not where Google expects them or can link to. The "infinite scrolling" fad contributes to this as there is no longer a page to link to. Google and Bing should penalize sites for making it difficult to link to specific images and content. For example, they can create a "2 page down" rule. If it takes more than two presses of the Page Down button (or equivalent per mouse/finger) to see indexed content, then penalize their rank score.
• mvkel 9y ago
  Isn’t this the best practice for, like, everyone? Name one social network that lets you view its content without a significant reg wall being displayed. You can’t see a single tweet without logging into twitter. Browsing Facebook? Good luck seeing past that login box that dominates half the browser screen. Want information about a restaurant on Yelp besides its address? Better login. Not sure why Pinterest is being singled out here.
• rabboRubble 9y ago
  [what I want to search] -site:pinterest.com
• unixhero 9y ago
  /offtopic I for one really dig Pinterest for my artsy hobbies. It's like a internet-curated image search with some quality assurance. Love it.
• GordonS 9y ago
  Is there a Firefox extension that can remove Pinterest links from Google search results? It really is infuriating when I click them and get a signin page over a bunch of images that seem to have no relation to what I searched for.