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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 site
by 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 agoWhich 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 agoAlmost 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 agoshould 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 agoThis 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 agoPinterest (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 agoIs 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 agoThe 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 agoWhat rules is Pinterest breaking? And what would it mean for Google to treat "all sites equally"?
- bambax 9y agoPlease read the link before commenting!
- twblalock 9y agoDon'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 agoThe third sentence explicitly states what rule Pinterest breaks....
- twblalock 9y agoThat'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 agoCloaking -- 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 agoI 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 agoremove 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 agoOr 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 agoPinterest. Not that spelling is important or anything.
- paulcole 9y agoGoogle shouldn’t (and doesn’t) treat all sites equally. This has been the core of their business since day one.
- huebnerob 9y agoI 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 agoThat’s exactly what op was saying.
- refulgentis 9y agoNo, it isn't.
- alehul 9y agoThat'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 agoPinterest 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 agoI 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 agoEven 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 agoIt 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 agoI 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 agoWhat 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 agoIt'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 agoGoogle 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 agoGoogle 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.