You're seeing the same images that Google does, it's just that these are dynamic pages that change over time. Google might only crawler pinterest.com/cute-cupca

You're seeing the same images that Google does, it's just that these are dynamic pages that change over time. Google might only crawler pinterest.com/cute-cupcakes/ every day, for example. Meanwhile, Pinterest refreshes the content of that page every day, but at a different time than Google crawls it. Boom, you click on the image google showed for "/cute-cupcakes/" and what Pinterest was showing is no longer there to be found. Both Google and Pinterest are misbehaving here. Google is using Pinterest to beef up its image search. Pinterest is using Google to get traffic. But Google won't share any of its precious data with other companies unless they pay for it, so Google doesn't pass anything like a hash or X-ORIGINAL-IMAGE-URL in the referrer headers when you click on a link, so Pinterest's hands are tied, sort of. Anyway plenty of bad behavior to go around. Both Pinterest or Google could probably solve the issue with better engineering. I put a bit more responsibility on Pinterest, but I'm not giving Google a total pass here either.