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Pinterest ruined photo search on the internet
- jimt1234 5y agoDo any dudes actually use Pinterest? Seriously (sort of).
- thinkling 5y agoGoogle 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.
- kingcharles 5y agoEven 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.
- dredmorbius 5y agoPinterest's response is noncredible. 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.
- 22c 5y agoBeing 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.
- dredmorbius 5y agoActively engaging in that manipulation refutes the message that the problem is strictly Google's. But I'm repeating myself. Disengenuous argument is disengenuous.
- godDLL 5y agoSo, 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? Would that not be a first?
- dredmorbius 5y agoThe 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. Either way, Pinterest are culpable.
- godDLL 5y agoWho exactly, and how much accountable would you hold? At pinterest.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoThen 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.
- npsimons 5y agoEvery 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.
- josephcsible 5y agoI 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.
- leephillips 5y agoGoogle doesn’t apply its rules to the big players; they generate a lot of ad revenue.
- Nextgrid 5y agoI’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?
- sltkr 5y agoYou'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: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2015/09/first-click-free-update https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2015/09/first-clic... https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/driving-future-digital-subscriptions/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...
- kingcharles 5y agoI 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.
- joshenders 5y agoHi, 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
- voldacar 5y agoYou have made the internet worse hope it paid well
- joshenders 5y agoDisagree. If you want to debate me, let’s hear your argument.
- 93po 5y agoI 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
- 5y ago
- kiryin 5y agoThe 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.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoIf Google deprioritized or entirely removed Pinterest images based on this feedback, wouldn’t that be seen as an abuse of power? (Honest question)
- rahidz 5y agoIf 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
- genewitch 5y agoIs there an absolute right to be indexed by Google or something?
- dazc 5y agoIs 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? https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
- micromacrofoot 5y agoIf a vendor walks into my store and poops all over the floor, would banning their product be an abuse of power?
- LanceH 5y agoFor a lot of people -- apparently -- the answer to that question can vary based upon their association with the perpetrator.
- 5y ago
- noasaservice 5y agoIt would be much better to exclude domains in search. But who owns that market? Google.
- postalrat 5y agoAnd how google allowed it to happen. Even after they said they are opposed to the behavior.
- mbesto 5y agoNon 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?
- handrous 5y agoThey 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?
- aigo 5y agoCouldn'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.
- smoldesu 5y agoAlternatively, 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.
- coldpie 5y agoThis is why using ad blockers is more ethical than not. The sooner we destroy ad-based business models, the sooner we can find a model that works.
- derekp7 5y agoThe trick I do is to use one of the returned images in a reverse Google photo search, and include a "-pinterest.com" tag. But that takes extra steps.
- munk-a 5y agoIf 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.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoBing image search has solved this problem. 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gonehome 5y agoGoogle'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.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoYeah google has by fiat down ranked entire classes of results and companies therein many many times... And yet Pinterest is exempt?
- lelandfe 5y ago
- cloud226 5y agoOr you can try search in Pinterest
- munk-a 5y agoI generally want to actually save interesting images I find - and not to another Pinterest board. Pinterest goes out of their way to make this operation annoying.
- paulpauper 5y agodoing 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
- sysadm1n 5y agoPinterest 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.
- joemi 5y agoThe 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.
- selfhoster11 5y agoSome of them have gone away from the original URL, or from the web entirely.
- quitit 5y agoAh yes, searching for anything in 2021 looks like: <search terms> -amazon -ebay -pinterest etc
- xattt 5y agoThis would be a great addition to the default search string in your browser of choice for your search engine of choice.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI just use DDG.
- dredmorbius 5y agoAs 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): ddg () { /usr/bin/w3m "https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q=$*&kd=-1" }
- 93po 5y agoi 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.
- quitit 5y agoI use DDG and although I still have this issue, your comment got me wondering what it was like on goog. … holy fucking shit.
- stjohnswarts 5y agowhat 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
- SeanLuke 5y agoUgh, 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."
- dmitrygr 5y agoBack in the day (grumble grumble) this was grounds for being delisted from google entirely.
- dylan604 5y agoBut how does googlebot know that? after indexing with googlebot, rescan as pinky-swear-not-googlebot?
- danuker 5y agoYou could look for special treatment in robots.txt. But that wouldn't show you what the server would say if you had a different user-agent.
- paxys 5y agoYeah, 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.
- dylan604 5y agoWould you run that from different servers/IPs in case site owners attempt to deny pinky-swear-not-googlebot?
- deckard1 5y agoObviously. 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. [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/verifying-googlebot https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
- friedman23 5y agoWhy do you think google enables this behavior? My guess is that the content from pinterest is actually relevant for the user.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoMy guess is they do what generates the most ad clicks.
- Nextgrid 5y agoDoes Pinterest run Google ads? As far as I know that’s not the case so why would Google favor them?
- munk-a 5y agoWith 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.
- dazc 5y agoI'd rather find the original content, Google could help me with this instead.
- canadianwriter 5y ago“As a search engine, Google controls how results appear based on engagement and how useful searchers find the content.” I guess they've never heard of noindex? You can very easily remove your content from Google image search, you just like all the traffic.
- kingcharles 5y agoWhy 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.
- sweetbitter 5y agoIs it really so bad that a malicious, anti-user company such as Google is being harmed by another malicious service?
- wackget 5y agoFlickr 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.
- adventured 5y agoCurrently 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.
- EamonnMR 5y agoPinterest 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pyb 5y agoA 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.
- numpad0 5y agouBlacklist is a good personal level mitigation to Pinterest problem. Just FYI.
- rebuilder 5y agoSince 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.
- bastardoperator 5y agoYandex image search for the win.
- aeturnum 5y agoI 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.
- alphabet9000 5y agoif 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. [0] https://github.com/fanfare/googleimagesrestored https://github.com/fanfare/googleimagesrestored
- 9679467j9464 5y agoHere's one for DDG: duckduckgo.com##.tile:has-text(/pinterest.com/)
- nyxaiur 5y agoPoison the wells until yours is the only one with clean water.
- yalogin 5y agoGoogle probably had a deal with Pinterest to keep them in the search results. Pinterest needs it to get user sign ups and so doesn't mind paying
- dazc 5y agoThis would go against the don't do evil mantra though?
- toephu2 5y agoI just typed 'scarf' in Google's image search and didn't see a single Pinterest link?
- danrocks 5y agoI am here to say the same thing. From Hong Kong, where I live, all results are links to e-commerce sites in the region, no pinterest results at all.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago> The spokesperson did provide some guidance "For those who would like to see Pinterest content from Google Search without signing in..." By "Pinterest content" you of course mean, other peoples images you don't own but have harvested?
- zarmin 5y agoCue Pinterest NFTs
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cole-k 5y agoForgive 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? [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546202
- AtNightWeCode 5y agoBS. 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.
- amelius 5y agoNo, Google ruined it by upranking Pinterest, even while users clearly don't want Pinterest results.
- nielsbot 5y agoFWIW, you can add `-site:pinterest.com` to your google search to filter these out. (Or just `-pinterest`)
- cletus 5y agoPinterest 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. Basically the Yelp playbook for the last decade.
- dopa42365 5y agoI recommend the uBlacklist browser extension (https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/ https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/) and simply block pinterest as well as all the stock image sites.
- bane 5y agoI 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. Pinterest is index cancer.
- rob74 5y agoPinterest 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...
- xtracto 5y agoNowadays 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.
- dredmorbius 5y agoLoathe 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 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.
- Jedd 5y agoI 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.
- mikestew 5y agoI may be misremembering... 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.
- nataz 5y agoHmmm, this is odd. I used to have an issue with Pinterest, but somehow I found a setting to remove from search results. Am I just a lucky a/b test?
- rpastuszak 5y agoWhere? I literally said in another comment that I’d pay for a service that does this:D
- rpastuszak 5y agoI’d pay for a search engine that would allow me me to automatically exclude certain domains from search results.
- NoPicklez 5y ago100% agree. I remember being able to use Google search and you could actually choose to see the image rather than navigate to the site.
- awa 5y agoAfaik, Google removed the "View image" feature due to the getty lawsuit. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
- wedesoft 5y agoYou can install the "View Image" Firefox addon to get a direct link to the image in your Google Image Search. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/view-image/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/view-image/
- musicale 5y ago> Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account. Newspaper site results are similarly useless: click on search result, get "this article is for subscribers only."
- StYorgen 5y agoThere a lot "hackers" in Google Search results Statista, for example, invaded in SERP with non attributed (without pay) data from open sources. Meantime data open sources findability, like World Bank, getting worse every year because the don't care about Google And Google don't care about better results But Statista care about money. So...
- StYorgen 5y ago*they 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. Way of life, neh.