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Hi, I worked at Pinterest and heavily supported the “Growth SEO” team from the infrastructure side 2014-2018 including attending weekly joint meetings between P

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

voldacar 5y ago
You have made the internet worse hope it paid well
- joshenders 5y ago
  Disagree. If you want to debate me, let’s hear your argument.
  - 93po 5y ago
    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
    - joshenders 5y ago
      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) No, that’s not what is happening at all here.
      - 93po 5y ago
        If someone takes a photo I own and post on my website and reposts it to pinterest, yes that is violating my copyright.
        joshenders 5y ago
        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.
        93po 5y ago
        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.
  - olig15 5y ago
    You just need to read peoples experiences of Pinterest in this thread. My search results are better without images from Pinterest showing up.
    - joshenders 5y ago
      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.
      - account42 5y ago
        > provides real value back to the end user 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?
  - greenpizza13 5y ago
    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. Do I have this wrong?
    - joshenders 5y ago
      Do you consider hackernews to be “hijacking” news content? Pinterest is no different.
      - account42 5y ago
        Hacker News doesn't rehost any articles and instead links to the original sources. Hacker News does not try to get search engines to list Hacker News before those original sources.
  - voldacar 5y ago
    Sure. My argument: - A search engine is good when it provides results that are useful and what you wanted. - 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.
    - joshenders 5y ago
      > - 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.
  - godDLL 5y ago
    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. I'll listen.
    - joshenders 5y ago
      > 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. https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/ https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/ 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.
      - godDLL 5y ago
        Acknowledged. When and if you decide to do a no-device, no-news, no-people retreat I'll love to hear what you and not your environment have to say though. Call me up then +9 72 58 666 1024 I am real, and I will listen.
buildbot 5y ago
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?
- joshenders 5y ago
  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.
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    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.
ladberg 5y ago
Do you know what Google's incentive was for participating in those meetings?
- joshenders 5y ago
  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.
  - joshenders 5y ago
    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”
Zaheer 5y ago
What was Google's incentive for engaging with Pinterest? Does Pinterest pay Google for favored rankings?
- joshenders 5y ago
  No. We absolutely did not pay for ranking or anything like that.
  - boublepop 5y ago
    Why didn’t you answer the question? > What was Google's incentive for engaging with Pinterest?
    - joshenders 5y ago
      Because I answered the same question below in two lengthy posts before responding to this response.
hosteur 5y ago
Do you think Pinterest is a net positive value for the web?
- joshenders 5y ago
  Sure, just as any other site is. 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.
jordigh 5y ago
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?
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't pounce on someone like this—it's clearly against the site guidelines: "Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) 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. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=disincent%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=disincent%20by:dang&dateRange=...
  - jordigh 5y ago
    I reworded my comment. Is that better?
    - dang 5y ago
      It's certainly better but it's still not great.
- joshenders 5y ago
  > You have us completely irrelevant hits. 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.
qwertox 5y ago
"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".
- andrewzah 5y ago
  You can append -pinterest to any search. That works well enough usually.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    What happens when there are, say, 100 such sites spamming SEO and polluting results? If the problem is significant enough to be a common meme, shouldn't search engines themselves be directly addressing the issue? Because as it stands, I'm making a point of dropping search tools that provide worthless results. Yeah, Google, you.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  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.
  - qwertox 5y ago
    I'd settle with Google marking any link to a paywalled site (including news articles behind a paywall) as an ad.
    - joshenders 5y ago
      I don’t think you’d be very satisfied with your remaining search results.
  - joshenders 5y ago
hosteur 5y ago
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.
- joshenders 5y ago
  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.
  - suzzer99 5y ago
    Well this went a direction I didn't expect.
grae_QED 5y ago
Have you ever felt a similar frustration outlined in the article? Specifically Pinterest image result clutter?
- joshenders 5y ago
  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.
  - joshenders 5y ago
    *Pin quality, not relevance
- joshenders 5y ago
  Oops. I didn’t answer your question. > Specifically Pinterest image result clutter? 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.
roughly 5y ago
Can you give me the user story for this?
- joshenders 5y ago
  Please elaborate
  - roughly 5y ago
    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.”
    - joshenders 5y ago
      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.
solarkraft 5y ago
Is the team aware of the hate by non-users this is causing Pinterest? If so, what’s the calculation for doing it anyway?
- joshenders 5y ago
  If “this” is the signup nag, then yes. It’s largely ignored because the nag can be easily closed and only non-expert users don’t understand this.
  - DharmaPolice 5y ago
    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?
    - joshenders 5y ago
      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: User page: https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/ https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/ Board page: https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/herpetology/ https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/herpetology/ Pin page: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/46232333644621276/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/46232333644621276/
      - LinAGKar 5y ago
        You get unclosable ones on .com too, at least on phones: https://imgur.com/a/cRyAwIW https://imgur.com/a/cRyAwIW
        joshenders 5y ago

voldacar 5y ago

You have made the internet worse hope it paid well

joshenders 5y ago
Disagree. If you want to debate me, let’s hear your argument.
- 93po 5y ago
  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
  - joshenders 5y ago
    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) No, that’s not what is happening at all here.
    - 93po 5y ago
      If someone takes a photo I own and post on my website and reposts it to pinterest, yes that is violating my copyright.
      - joshenders 5y ago
        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.
        93po 5y ago
        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.
- olig15 5y ago
  You just need to read peoples experiences of Pinterest in this thread. My search results are better without images from Pinterest showing up.
  - joshenders 5y ago
    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.
    - account42 5y ago
      > provides real value back to the end user 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?
- greenpizza13 5y ago
  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. Do I have this wrong?
  - joshenders 5y ago
    Do you consider hackernews to be “hijacking” news content? Pinterest is no different.
    - account42 5y ago
      Hacker News doesn't rehost any articles and instead links to the original sources. Hacker News does not try to get search engines to list Hacker News before those original sources.
- voldacar 5y ago
  Sure. My argument: - A search engine is good when it provides results that are useful and what you wanted. - 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.
  - joshenders 5y ago
    > - 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.
- godDLL 5y ago
  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. I'll listen.
  - joshenders 5y ago
    > 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. https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/ https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/ 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.
    - godDLL 5y ago
      Acknowledged. When and if you decide to do a no-device, no-news, no-people retreat I'll love to hear what you and not your environment have to say though. Call me up then +9 72 58 666 1024 I am real, and I will listen.

buildbot 5y ago

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?

joshenders 5y ago
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.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  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.

ladberg 5y ago

Do you know what Google's incentive was for participating in those meetings?

joshenders 5y ago
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.
- joshenders 5y ago
  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”

Zaheer 5y ago

What was Google's incentive for engaging with Pinterest? Does Pinterest pay Google for favored rankings?

joshenders 5y ago
No. We absolutely did not pay for ranking or anything like that.
- boublepop 5y ago
  Why didn’t you answer the question? > What was Google's incentive for engaging with Pinterest?
  - joshenders 5y ago
    Because I answered the same question below in two lengthy posts before responding to this response.

hosteur 5y ago

Do you think Pinterest is a net positive value for the web?

joshenders 5y ago
Sure, just as any other site is. 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.

jordigh 5y ago

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?

dang 5y ago
Please don't pounce on someone like this—it's clearly against the site guidelines: "Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) 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. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=disincent%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=disincent%20by:dang&dateRange=...
- jordigh 5y ago
  I reworded my comment. Is that better?
  - dang 5y ago
    It's certainly better but it's still not great.
joshenders 5y ago
> You have us completely irrelevant hits. 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.

qwertox 5y ago

"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".

andrewzah 5y ago
You can append -pinterest to any search. That works well enough usually.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  What happens when there are, say, 100 such sites spamming SEO and polluting results? If the problem is significant enough to be a common meme, shouldn't search engines themselves be directly addressing the issue? Because as it stands, I'm making a point of dropping search tools that provide worthless results. Yeah, Google, you.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
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.
- qwertox 5y ago
  I'd settle with Google marking any link to a paywalled site (including news articles behind a paywall) as an ad.
  - joshenders 5y ago
    I don’t think you’d be very satisfied with your remaining search results.
- joshenders 5y ago

hosteur 5y ago

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.

joshenders 5y ago
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.
- suzzer99 5y ago
  Well this went a direction I didn't expect.

grae_QED 5y ago

Have you ever felt a similar frustration outlined in the article? Specifically Pinterest image result clutter?

joshenders 5y ago
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.
- joshenders 5y ago
  *Pin quality, not relevance
joshenders 5y ago
Oops. I didn’t answer your question. > Specifically Pinterest image result clutter? 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.

roughly 5y ago

Can you give me the user story for this?

joshenders 5y ago
Please elaborate
- roughly 5y ago
  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.”
  - joshenders 5y ago
    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.

solarkraft 5y ago

Is the team aware of the hate by non-users this is causing Pinterest? If so, what’s the calculation for doing it anyway?

joshenders 5y ago
If “this” is the signup nag, then yes. It’s largely ignored because the nag can be easily closed and only non-expert users don’t understand this.
- DharmaPolice 5y ago
  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?
  - joshenders 5y ago
    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: User page: https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/ https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/ Board page: https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/herpetology/ https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/herpetology/ Pin page: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/46232333644621276/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/46232333644621276/
    - LinAGKar 5y ago
      You get unclosable ones on .com too, at least on phones: https://imgur.com/a/cRyAwIW https://imgur.com/a/cRyAwIW
      - joshenders 5y ago