4 ms·

It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the block list. The existence of it i

It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the block list. The existence of it is genuinely mind boggling in a way that’s similar to face tattoos or Toddlers and Tiaras. Why would anyone want that to exist? At all? What is wrong with humanity?

Eisenstein 3y ago
I would love to see a history and expose of Pinterest.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  Doxing isn't doxing if it's part of a documentary.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Not sure what you are implying but doxing has a specific meaning.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      I'm making an implication about the release of private details in a public forum. Whether the public sees it as good or bad depends on the forum. eg:Pics of their home is bad on social media, good in an expose. I think it's because we realize that outcome should not be the only thing we value. Intent can heavily impact the benevolence of something.
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        I'm a bit confused why you felt the need to make that point. Are you saying you think documentaries are a basic privacy violation? What about journalism in general?
        jrflowers 3y ago
        I don’t think waronprivacy knows what exposé means in this context. Rather than addressing the very obvious implication that you meant a description of how a publicly traded company creates policy they found opportunity to talk about posting pictures of people’s homes online. I’m assuming they would’ve brought this up if you’d posted any other triggering key words like “newspaper” or “journalism”
Jaygles 3y ago
It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most useless website in their web search.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  There's no reason to believe those smartest engineers' incentives are to give you good search results. If this was a technical problem this would be solved long ago by a simple "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()". The problem is that the company employing those engineers is acting maliciously and benefits from you wasting your time with irrelevant/unusable search results as it contributes to "engagement" on the search results page and makes the sponsored results (aka spam) more likely to be clicked (even if by accident). They can get away with it since (besides Kagi) the competition is no better due to having the exact same business model.
  - Jaygles 3y ago
    Incentives surely play a massive role but it certainly is a technical problem. Pinterest must be showing up in Kagi's search in order for it to be so high up in the block list rankings. Do they share Google's incentives? The technical problem is deciding what is relevant when you have the entire world working towards gaming your search algorithm to appear at the top of the results. This makes it a cat and mouse game, and playing whack-a-mole by doing things like "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()", isn't scalable.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      > Do they share Google's incentives? No and that's why they are offering the ability to tweak per-domain ranking per user, along with a leaderboard of most-blocked domains so people can easily find and block problematic domains. The issue with blocking Pinterest by default is that people who use Pinterest might actually want those results, so that's not a good default.
Nextgrid 3y ago
Pinterest is a successful product that provides value to its users (I'm not the target market and I guess most of us aren't either, but there is a segment of people that do get value out of it). I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search. I'm sure they don't mind the free SEO but I don't believe there is an explicit effort to mislead search engine crawlers (especially considering other engines correctly ignore such pages). The problem is that their pages unintentionally trigger a flaw in Google's crawler (it's unable to detect that the content is actually obscured by a JS-based login wall) and Google is unwilling to implement an override because this spam contributes to their bottom-line (increases "engagement" on the search results page).
- jrflowers 3y ago
  > I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search… And > The problem is that their pages exploit a flaw in Google's crawler… Don’t seem to be statements that really make any consistent sense. It’s like if you ordered soup and instead got a bowl of human shit, a thousand times, and then felt compelled to explain that nobody wants you to eat shit, it’s just that bowls are a really convenient place to shit in.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Pages are primarily written for display & human consumption. Whatever was left of the "semantic HTML" went out the window when everyone switched to the JS SPA fad. As far as I know there is no "right" way to design a JS SPA overlay/loginwall in a way that search engines ignore it - it's not like Pinterest is intentionally ignoring a spec or designing a page that misleads search engine crawlers (other engines seem to handle Pinterest just fine). Outright denying access to search engines could be wrong because logged-in Pinterest users may actually want those results, so that's not a good solution either. The fault is ultimately on Google for ignoring this high-profile issue for such a long time because it contributes to their bottom-line, even though a very simple, low-tech fix (easier than making the crawler recognize such loginwalls reliably) could be to just allow users to make their own decision as to whether to block the domain, like Kagi has done.

Eisenstein 3y ago

I would love to see a history and expose of Pinterest.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
Doxing isn't doxing if it's part of a documentary.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  Not sure what you are implying but doxing has a specific meaning.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    I'm making an implication about the release of private details in a public forum. Whether the public sees it as good or bad depends on the forum. eg:Pics of their home is bad on social media, good in an expose. I think it's because we realize that outcome should not be the only thing we value. Intent can heavily impact the benevolence of something.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      I'm a bit confused why you felt the need to make that point. Are you saying you think documentaries are a basic privacy violation? What about journalism in general?
      - jrflowers 3y ago
        I don’t think waronprivacy knows what exposé means in this context. Rather than addressing the very obvious implication that you meant a description of how a publicly traded company creates policy they found opportunity to talk about posting pictures of people’s homes online. I’m assuming they would’ve brought this up if you’d posted any other triggering key words like “newspaper” or “journalism”

Jaygles 3y ago

It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most useless website in their web search.

Nextgrid 3y ago
There's no reason to believe those smartest engineers' incentives are to give you good search results. If this was a technical problem this would be solved long ago by a simple "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()". The problem is that the company employing those engineers is acting maliciously and benefits from you wasting your time with irrelevant/unusable search results as it contributes to "engagement" on the search results page and makes the sponsored results (aka spam) more likely to be clicked (even if by accident). They can get away with it since (besides Kagi) the competition is no better due to having the exact same business model.
- Jaygles 3y ago
  Incentives surely play a massive role but it certainly is a technical problem. Pinterest must be showing up in Kagi's search in order for it to be so high up in the block list rankings. Do they share Google's incentives? The technical problem is deciding what is relevant when you have the entire world working towards gaming your search algorithm to appear at the top of the results. This makes it a cat and mouse game, and playing whack-a-mole by doing things like "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()", isn't scalable.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    > Do they share Google's incentives? No and that's why they are offering the ability to tweak per-domain ranking per user, along with a leaderboard of most-blocked domains so people can easily find and block problematic domains. The issue with blocking Pinterest by default is that people who use Pinterest might actually want those results, so that's not a good default.

Nextgrid 3y ago

Pinterest is a successful product that provides value to its users (I'm not the target market and I guess most of us aren't either, but there is a segment of people that do get value out of it). I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search. I'm sure they don't mind the free SEO but I don't believe there is an explicit effort to mislead search engine crawlers (especially considering other engines correctly ignore such pages). The problem is that their pages unintentionally trigger a flaw in Google's crawler (it's unable to detect that the content is actually obscured by a JS-based login wall) and Google is unwilling to implement an override because this spam contributes to their bottom-line (increases "engagement" on the search results page).

jrflowers 3y ago
> I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search… And > The problem is that their pages exploit a flaw in Google's crawler… Don’t seem to be statements that really make any consistent sense. It’s like if you ordered soup and instead got a bowl of human shit, a thousand times, and then felt compelled to explain that nobody wants you to eat shit, it’s just that bowls are a really convenient place to shit in.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Pages are primarily written for display & human consumption. Whatever was left of the "semantic HTML" went out the window when everyone switched to the JS SPA fad. As far as I know there is no "right" way to design a JS SPA overlay/loginwall in a way that search engines ignore it - it's not like Pinterest is intentionally ignoring a spec or designing a page that misleads search engine crawlers (other engines seem to handle Pinterest just fine). Outright denying access to search engines could be wrong because logged-in Pinterest users may actually want those results, so that's not a good solution either. The fault is ultimately on Google for ignoring this high-profile issue for such a long time because it contributes to their bottom-line, even though a very simple, low-tech fix (easier than making the crawler recognize such loginwalls reliably) could be to just allow users to make their own decision as to whether to block the domain, like Kagi has done.