Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
More and more often when I search (using text queries, not image search, which I know has been polluted by Pinterest for years), I get pages upon pages of Pinterest results, sometimes the same Pinterest page but from the different pinterest country domains like pinterest.fi for Finland and pinterest.se for Sweden. Does anyone know if Google gives Pinterest preferential treatement in SEO rankings?
Edit: A few comments were asking what my queries were to generate search results where Pinterest dominates, so clarifying that a bit. I run a site that has a colour search engine for lipsticks and since Google is one of the dominant ways in which people land on my site (searching for things like "nyx budapest lipstick dupes"), I was studying various makeup related queries to see which sites ranked highest .
Edit2: Edited the title for clarity - I mean text search, not image search
328 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadhttps://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-...
TIL Pinterest is a publicly traded company (NYSE:PINS).
I also think there's a disconnect between how new algorithms are evaluated and real world results. Reverse image search is total trash now. Mostly returns annotations "red, dress, girl" instead of the pages where I can find the image.
Unless it's a brand name product, then it's exact matches.
So you're getting less than excellence in engineering, plus influence from shopping and ad dollar focused PMs and not much care is actually given to the search experience.
And it shows
Pinterest shows up because they understand how the Google algorithm works and built their website to display all the signals that Google looks for in relevant image content.
They understand user intent and generate URLs that present content in a way that google expects to see.
Examples of how they do this from their engineering team:
https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/demystifying-seo-wi...
More:
https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/tagged/seo
I seriously doubt that most pinterest results are what users are seeking. As such, Google probably should consider changes to their algorithm to compensate (cat and mouse) for pinterest's gaming. That is assuming how pinterest does it is not against any google rules... because if it were against any rules, they should be slapped down hard.
When my searches result in mostly pinterest results, I give up more quickly. That means I spend less time using google, and that in theory means less money for google. Unfortunately, I do see other more regular user types operate their computers, and they are less or un-descriminating about the domain name listed under the image. So they'll head directly into the pinterest waste pond anyway.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
Reverse image search is also intentionally gimped, unlike non-US jurisdiction Yandex which is quite good.
It's certainly for legal reasons, not technical, but Image Search has gotten progressively worse every year. It used to be godly effective 10 years ago.
That’s possible thanks to Microsoft’s Bing API. I’m surprised Getty (who’s afaik responsible for Google removing direct image links) only went after Google and not Microsoft.
Programmer: There's nothing wrong with the service, you just have to use [magic incantation] to make it work right.
I've been hoping for 20 years that this kind of exchange would stop happening. Still hoping! :-)
Because helpful technologists are the interface between less knowledgeable users and services like Google. We’re the power users and “mavens” who are both highly exposed to the product and have some understanding of what’s going wrong and how it might be made better. We also spend a lot more time talking to that product’s engineering staff than the typical user (see e.g. the fact that we’re here on HN.)
When helpful technologists opt out of the problematic aspects of a product by uttering some magic incantation, we essentially remove ourselves from having to be annoyed by the product’s rough edges. This means we’re less likely to help improve the service for everyone, and we’re probably more likely to incorporate similar carelessness into the things we make ourselves.
How, really, could you improve the Google service for everyone?
* Or people who talk to Search engineers regularly, etc.
But yes I see your point. I call it the "permanent workaround"
So, to counter, I'm glad that they did say this as it regularly annoys me too.
User: -pinterest
Google: we need your personal information so we can improve your experience
User: -pinterest!!
et cetera, ad infinitum ...
And you’d think people with a Pinterest account would opt to search on their website/app rather than going through Google (thus making it even more unlikely that the Google user has a Pinterest account).
And, no, most people don't bother picking a site before searching. Why would they artificially limit their results? People don't even visit amazon before searching for Amazon products.
I’m not saying that 100% of all users with a Pinterest account use their website/app, but many of them will of course opt to use Pinterest’s website/app for their image searches, which means an even smaller percentage of the Google Image Search users will have a Pinterest account.
But their hiring process is broken. They randomly hire a % of people who pass an algorithm test. It's so random that 70% of their workforce wouldn't be hired again if they had to go through that process.
The brand is so strong that people think anyone who makes it into google must be the best of the best. It's more like a random person who has studied leetcode.
Multiply by 100 users with different opinions, all entitled, on how thing should work.
I've been using this userscript since then. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
It might be called Google Hit Hider by Domain but the author has expanded it to cover most major search engines over the years.
Not directly relevant to anything except how lame google has become.
[1] I wonder if the meme "DDG is not that good" is so prevalent on Hacker News because it sucks for programming stuff.
Not to mention the awful vendor blogs and stores and secretive marketing clickbait masquerading as a neutral information totally dominating Google's page 1 and 2 of results.
That said, I don’t like being tracked. It’s not clear to me if the quality of results I am seeing are due to Google’s tracking or not. (I suppose I could research this but I’ve not done so.)
I am cynical. Maybe Google's own experiments show that users click more ads when they get frustrated of the Pinterest spam that is technically not spam enough to be removed from the index.
What the users are going to do? Use Bing?
Google's most optimised version is probably being an Ads search engine where you are presented only with the most lucrative ads that are relative to your query. Essentially Yellow pages.
duckduckgo isn't horrific. And certainly not for image searches, which is how Pinterest's pollution ends up being noticed.
After reading the anti trust filing it’s hard to argue Google is anything else but evil and a lot of what it does is to hide its monopoly.
This is completely false. I've personally been involved in launching ranking changes that negatively impacted revenue substantially. I didn't find out until months later through the grapevine, and only in vague terms like "ads had to scramble." Versions of them remain in production today. Revenue projections were never considered as part of the launch decision, nor have they they been consulted as part of evaluating subsequent versions.
If Googlers were allowed to consider revenue in the search results perhaps they wouldn't have been so easily down graded to a second class citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda
> In 2016, Matt Cutts, Google's head of webspam at the time of the Panda update, commented that "with Panda, Google took a big enough revenue hit via some partners that Google actually needed to disclose Panda as a material impact on an earnings call. But I believe it was the right decision to launch Panda, both for the long-term trust of our users and for a better ecosystem for publishers."
Disclosure I work at Google.
Well to be fair, probably the engineers want to on some level, but there is a business mandate to not (and there always has been).
'What Google Wants' and 'What We Want' have reached a crude equilibrium and it's unlikely to change that much, even if there are obvious improvements to make.
Qualitative improvements beyond need generally require a very specific corporate and cultural focus. If Sergei or Larry 'came back' and mandated it, the system would move around it. Or Sundar could, maybe, pull that off, but it's not in his DNA really.
The lack of material innovation in search stopped over a decade ago.
Otherwise, we should be getting betas every few months, with all sorts of options, features, etc. Even simple things like 'forever blocking a site by default' would be great.
Google results would be better for me with all Pinterest results removed.
Examples are nytimes.com and dw.com
-site:pinterest.*
Even with wildcard tld, otherwise it is still all Pinterest
But it is interesting that those kind of Google/search engine feature hardly ever get talked about these days whereas in the past they were considered crucial to get decent results.
But I'm wondering if this would not be better implemented at browser level. Can we have the white/black list run locally in the browser, re-ranking results on web pages and hiding what we don't want to see? Not just on Google, but also on the rest of the web, like ad blocking extensions.
Then save it as a bookmark.
e.g.
Use that bookmark as your search engine: click on it, then fill in search terms.https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/issues/674
I guess that interfered with Google extracting ad money.
Recently they removed the facility to, when saving a pin, to type the name of the board to find it, now having to scroll through an alphabetical listing.
Before that, they also redesigned the website such that a refresh of the page was required in order to save a pin to two different boards, an action they explicitly support.
The website is also a slow resource hog.
Of course, it comes with the tried and tested “corporate morality” where there are rules against various things that are phrased in terms of moral concerns that are really about keeping their app on the Apple store — this naturally includes vague standards on “nudity” that are not worded in a gendered way, but there is an unofficial code that everyone knows that it very much is.
The most annoying moral preaching I encountered was that I searched for “boy's love” once — the genre of male–male tragic romantic fiction, that got me a preachy message about pædophilia that made me suspect my i.p. address was probably passed on to some U.S.A. authorities. It's really quite a big genre and has nothing to do with pædophilia.
They only recently added a way to search one's own's pins, and it's very lacking and doesn't reliably even catch words in the descriptions thereof. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn't.
What can be said about it is that the algorithm for finding related things is generally quite good — the interesting thing is that it's actually better at finding the aforementioned boy's love fiction than most of the websites that actually host it.
The problem is that there is no real competitor.
If the user is confused on how to do something then it keeps them on the page longer and pushes the metrics up
taps on head
I find Pinterest useful as an image search engine.
I never want Pinterest. I don't have an account. I don't want one. I will never want one.
I remember when Google added a functionality to block domains entirely from your results. They removed it soon after though; I'm guessing some big advertiser was blacklisted many times.
In practice, losing customers means less money for Google. Pinterest is a large Google customer. As individual users, we are very tiny bits of a very large target, but we are not customers.
Recently, it has been revealed that Pinterest reverse-image searches Google for uploaded images and adds the Google query result to the Pinterest image page for SEO: https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-...
This degrades quality of Google image search, for example this Reddit post on removing Pinterest got 77k upvotes:
Reddit r/LifeProTips to remove Pinterest from Google searches: https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/hejbl0/lpt_whe...
Earlier Reddit petition to Google to remove Pinterest from search results (66k upvotes): https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/85atho/pinterest_ne...
Hacker News discussion of Pinterest's Google scraping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701998
Earlier discussion on HackerNews (1.1k upvotes): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996
"Unpinterested" Chrome extension to combat Pinterest spam (10k+ downloads): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...
Well, yeah, since even if you click through Pinterest won't actually show you the content.
Isn't that supposed to disqualify them from appearing in search results at all?
Pinterest landing pages are intentionally unusable for anyone without an account. It's hard to make a good-faith argument that those pages are the "most relevant result" for someone making a simple image search.
Bing is terrible, but it's better than google.
Which means that google is worse than terrible.
How is it blackhat to do exactly what Google wants?
TLDR: they are gaming google
Grandmas cookies are going to be better than 24 years old copypaste cookies for big bad marketing company.
But there is an effort at Pinterest to promote itself via Google. Pinterest pays Google for online ad aservices. Pinterest is a Google customer. The user is not.
The bottom line at Google is not driven by showing users the "best" results for users. The bottom line is driven by customers such as Pinterest who pay Google to assist them with online advertising.
Page and Brin identified this conflict of interest in their 1998 paper introducing Google, which was originally intended to be an academic endeavor, not to become an online ad services company.^1 According to the authors, (a) the interests of users and advertisers are not one in the same, (b) there are inherent effects on search results if the search engine is funded by advertising, and (c) the behind-the-scenes operation ("technical details") of search engines funded by advertising become largely non-transparent to users/competitors (a "black art").
I reckon (c) is why we get questions like this one from the OP.
I have also seen these inexplicable and useless Pinterest links in Google searches.
1. https://research.google/pubs/pub334.pdf
Quotes:
"To make matters worse, some advertisers attempt to gain people's attention by taking measures meant to mislead automated search engines."
"Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm."
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."
"For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
"Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results."
"But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_magic) describes black magic as "the use of supernatural powers or magic for evil and selfish purposes."^1
1. J. Gordon Melton, ed. (2001). "Black Magic". Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology. Vol 1: A-L (Fifth ed.). Gale Research Inc. ISBN 0-8103-9488-X.
Though I’m sure you’ve noticed in recent years that Google has begun to replace many search results with answers directly from them instead of redirecting you to places like Pinterest. For the better I say. Companies like Pinterest are parasitic and degrade the overall ecosystem of search.
Image search has been borked due to Pinterest results for a few years now, but now my text queries have also started being dominated more and more often by their search results. I'm bummed that Google doesn't count the different Pinterest country domains as duplicates and remove them. instead there is like pages upon pages of the same Pinterest result.
> Companies like Pinterest are parasitic
Surely you mean companies like Google are parasitic?
Currently, many big tech companies do basically whatever they want. Facebook and other ad companies have been caught knowingly defrauding ad spend customers, Amazon has been knowingly permitting counterfeit sales for years, Uber has been ignoring regional laws globally, Airbnb was (and may still be) ignoring or hiding data that illustrates their connection with increased housing pressures, and on and on.
Doing what you can get away with (because the cost of the penalty is lower than the profit that results from the bad behavior) is not ok. It doesn't contribute to an improved civilization, it pushes civilization back down toward a zero-sum, selfish survivalist mentality. I know it sounds corny or hippie, but if people can try to better balance their own desires against the good of the community, the end result will surely be better.
Obviously we have a new frontier of digital stuff, but the law and economic incentives are still ignorant of it.
Sometimes law and policy is ignorant of technical concerns, but quite often it is aware and simply has a more selfish agenda. Prime example of this is modern US copyright and patent laws and enforcement.
As long as elected officials have to raise funds to campaign and win, elected officials will be beholden to the people who financed them. If politicians didn't write special laws and loopholes for corporate special interests, they wouldn't last more than one term. They would be replaced by the next challenger who would take special interest money and then "pay it back" via special laws.
5 of 7 images on the first row of results was some pinterest site.
I wish I had looked into this before! :-)
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...
I also use it for w3schools and a few other common search result spam sites.
Then Google started ignoring more and more of what I searched for and they also started blocking the worst offenders so I forgot about it.
These days I mostly use DuckDuckGo for my programming searches.
Source: I run a think tank focused on Google’s web crawling advantage and have been studying stuff like this for a couple years now.
What incentive would Google have to continue populating that index?
Would I be breaking the law if I independently crawled and hosted an index without publishing an API for it?
> since no one other than Google is really allowed to crawl the web
Maybe this is the problem that needs solving.
Presumably they would still want to run google.com and make money off of it.
> Would I be breaking the law if I independently crawled and hosted an index without publishing an API for it?
No. You would not get the advantage that Google gets when it crawls the web and so would not have access to a large amount of data that nobody else has access to.
Updated based on edit of parent post:
> Maybe this is the problem that needs solving.
Why have websites waste the money to serve all those requests all over again? Why don't we have Google share the results and we can use that money to do more productive things than recreating that work? I don't think website operators would be happy if there were a hundred more crawlers out there crawling as much as Google does now.
Perhaps other search engines should spoof GoogleBot. Browsers have being doing that since forever spoofing Netscape (Mozilla), Safari, etc. for the same reason.
> Why don't we have Google share the results and we can use that money to do more productive things than recreating that work?
This sounds like a common fallacy of people criticizing the free market. Duplicated effort looks wasteful but turns out to be far more productive than the lack of incentive that comes with not being able to profit from your work/investment.
The benefit varies with the quality of the search engines, and that will vary between search engines, but it does get larger the more a search engine is used, so a cost/benefits analysis may show Google and a few other large ones are the only ones worth supporting.
Spoofing crawler identity completely defeats the point of the honor-system robots.txt.
Many website operators do actually block crawlers from non Google search engines and it's because the cost of being crawled isn't worth it to them. Here's a good quote from one such webmaster:
Taken from http://www.skrenta.com/2008/04/cuill_is_banned_on_10000_site...> Perhaps other search engines should spoof GoogleBot. Browsers have being doing that since forever spoofing Netscape (Mozilla), Safari, etc. for the same reason.
People have tried this and it doesn't work. Google provides ways to check to make sure traffic is coming from Google IP addresses and practitioners and academics study how to spot fake Googlebots. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/... https://blogs.akamai.com/2014/07/search-engine-impersonation... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8421894
> This sounds like a common fallacy of people criticizing the free market.
I am asserting that crawling the web is a natural monopoly. This means that the free market has failed and that it is not possible for the market to heal itself in this regard. There is significant evidence that this is the case and I imagine you'll be hearing more and more about it soon.
Not going to jail, presumably.
??
The first is that Google gets much more access to pages on websites than everybody else. You can see this by examining the robots.txt files of various websites[0]. I've been doing this for several years now and Google has a consistent advantage across many thousands websites that I've looked at. This adds up to a significant advatnage and many search engine operators complain about how it hampers their ability to compete with Google[1].
The second is that Google gets to ignore crawl delay directive in robots.txt while other search engines don't[2]. Website operators cannot tell Google how fast they want their website crawled, they can only request that Google slow down. If another search engine tried to do what Google does, they would likely be blocked by many important websites.
If you would like to read more about this, please checkout https://knuckleheads.club/
[0] https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/robots.txt
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...
[2] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-noindex-in-robots-txt-de...
For me it was a problem of having lots of pages, and having a high cost per request (due to the type of website it was).
For other websites, it is not necessarily about the volume of traffic from bots, but the risk of web scrapers getting their proprietary data. They're fine with Google scraping their info because that's where their traffic comes from. They're not okay with some random bot scraping them because it could be taking their content and republishing it, or scraping user profile data, or using it for some nefarious/competitive purpose.
That's some weird logic, to me at least. That data is literally given away to everyone but some people or organizations can't have it? If you want to control access to it, maybe at least require people to register before they can see it? Is it even proprietary if it's public with no access control whatsoever?
This for-profit internet is just really such a parallel universe to me.
It’s a different world where there are no laws or prices or contracts really.
I know I have been a contrary commentor in this thread, but I hear you with this. What a monster we have built, and what always gets me is how trivial everything is. So much capital is flowing through these ephemeral software systems that, if gone tomorrow, would be ultimately inconsequential to mankind.
> and what always gets me is how trivial everything is
Whenever I read about corporations and how they work, I always inevitably ask myself the question "where the hell does enough work to keep this many people busy even come from". Everything is ridiculously overengineered to meet imaginary deadlines.
It's often a question of quantity. LinkedIn probably doesn't care about you scraping a few profiles, but if you're harvesting every bit of their publicly-available data, then they get a little scared that you're building something that's going to compete with them.
Same with Instagram, or Facebook, for example. Though in this case it's probably more of a user-privacy issue - at least that's what they say.
It's not really weird logic to me - seems to make sense.
> If you want to control access to it, maybe at least require people to register
Most of the time they can't do this because they need the Google traffic. LinkedIn wants a result in the SERP for Bob Smith when you search for "Bob Smith" because that helps them get signups. Google won't list the page if that content is gated by a sign-in/register page.
This is exactly how it works with user-agents and your naivety here is shining bright.
That does seem like a good idea since it amounts essentially to a database of stuff that Google does not own (by construction) and is of public utility.
If you would like to read more about all this, please checkout https://knuckleheads.club
Some feedback:
- A cost of membership runs contrary to establishing this group, especially at such a high recurring charge.
- I'm not sure what your software/AWS situation looks like, but 20 million robots.txt files acquired from Common Crawl is something I can analyze on my PC. It doesn't seem to presently justify such high costs.
- Prioritize building a mockup index with an intuitive frontend. This is essential for non-technical people to understand
- Exclusively talk with EU legislators (they are motivated, whereas nothing will happen in the US).
I think the price for membership dues is reasonable and many people agree evidenced by them signing up. I think I might start a petition that is free to sign up on though, thank you for the inspiration!
It is possible to analyze those files on the pc, it just takes a much longer time. The analysis is an iterative process and so the faster the computers the faster the iterations and process go. I was analyzing them on my pc with python for the first year until it got too slow and my I am using an aws server with some rust and that is going much better. I also need to increase the number of files analyzed by about two orders of magnitude soon as well.
Great idea, very cool. That’s going on the todo list!
And I am going to be reaching out to and speaking with whoever is interested. One of the fun things about this is that it is an international dynamic, with some jurisdictions having abilities that others don’t. For example, the UK CMA has subpoena powers that the US Congress lacks and got a ton of information out of Google and Bing that shocked me. The US has the ability to get the CEO’s to show up to hearings while the UK does not in the same way. Why limit ourselves to one government when there are so many to mix and match from here?
How would that work? I'm pretty curious about this if there's anything out there to read.
EDIT: Ah I saw the link to Knuckleheads' Club :P
Only running the right SEO wasn't sufficient then and I certain wish that criteria remained.
Of course, "quality" applied is a broad term indeed. But there no being a single certain measure of quality doesn't mean there aren't some things that most people would call crap. Google employs a large number of search quality raters and these folks can likely distinguish the terrible from the OK.
Google is far from ideal and getting worse but you seem to be exposing a pure democracy of algorithm conformance, which is guaranteed to result in hot, steaming idiocy.
The discussion is about Pininterest in text searches. My only objection to Pinterest in image searches is that it's paywalled/login-walled.
But larger issue is I'd acknowledge some search results just aren't what I in particular want but I'd claim other results are actually objectively low quality and you seem to want to push things to realm of pure subjectivity, any old crap is something someone might want and who I am to deny to them that pnis enlargement pill.
I would say that the results Google returns involve a number of factor/filters. A. What's considered mainstream, what appeals to many B. What's could be more or less objectively called quality. C. SEO, What results just slip through based on the page spending a lot of time and money appearing like A or B to the algorithm (but not being that).
And Google spends a huge amount of time and money trying to keep C from being the only thing BUT that's still not enough because there's a lot of time and money spent on the other end. At the time, this tug-of-war serves as a moat keeping competitors out. Any Google competitor would have to invest similar amounts of money.
Google has, does and always will make choices about what is best and that the definition of best is up to their discretion.*
I'd love to have a decent Google competitor. But I don't think you have won many friend here by implying that Google's discretion is just arbitrary (as a number of your posts here seem to imply to me). Google won, back when they had competition, by caring a lot about the, uh, quality of their search results. Now that they've won, they're slipping into other things and moreover, the SEO trash are nipping their heels.
Which is to say you won't build Google alternatives on "democracy" but on some concept of quality people will want.
Continuing out the logic of your suggestion here, you would seem to imply that every other currently existing search engine besides Google also has bad quality as well in this regard. I say this because if other search engines had better quality that Google, they would be doing better than Google as per your suggestion. But, obviously Google is on top in a big way, so I have to ask, do you think the entire search engine industry, not just Google, has poor quality search results? What do you know that they don't?
Me earlier: larger issue is I'd acknowledge some search results just aren't what I in particular want but I'd claim other results are actually objectively low quality
It seems like you just a kind of "shtick". Anyone talking about quality, no how much nuance they add to it, gets thrown the same "how do you your ideas of quality are right". I already mentioned that quality is piece of Google formula and Google spend real money attaining that, employs thousands of people to rate search quality. Of course I'm not claiming to be a personal expert on quality. You can read further what I actual wrote above.
Making that historical engagement data public is not feasible/realistic, IMO.
I have never worked for a search engine company (or devoted much time to SEO), but I would suggest the click-and-query data advantage is invaluable to cementing Google's supremacy over any newcomers.
I’ve heard search engine operators complain about the index consistently while they seem spilt about the click and query data. For example, DuckDuckGo and StartPage have made pretty good businesses out of pointedly not collecting click and query data. For my part, I think it’s the dual lock on distribution via exclusive agreements on being the default search engine and the advantages it has when web crawling that cements Google’s dominance over the search engine market.
I've only ever met one person that had anything to do with a think tank at a party about a decade ago, and I never got her contact details so I'm still very much in the dark.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21622322 (Nov 2019) "Tell HN: Google should drop Quora from search results" 1000+ upvotes
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996 (Mar 2018) “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO” 1100+ upvotes
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16388833 (Feb 2018)
And many more: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
1. Often, the image I'm looking for isn't the main image on the page, just one of the small thumbnails and very hard to find on the page
2. Almost every single time I click on a pinterest result, I end up going back because it doesn't help me, i assume others do the same.
Are those organic results? Or do they have a kickass SEO team that games Google’s algorithm.
I'm getting sick of my searches being "corrected", sometimes they even ignore the quotes.
I share the sentiment in other comments that search engines are (deliberately?) allowing SEO abusers to degrade the user's experience. I noticed that for some queries (Like "How to brush teeth"), there are more ads on the first page than results! They're marked, but not in an immediately-visible way; I'd be most people integrate them with search results mentally.
I started throwing together a search engine about a week ago to address these concerns, and put it online yesterday. (https://www.pageref.org). I'm deliberately penalizing SEO abusers, and promoting websites that have high-quality content. Running custom searches on these sites in some cases based on keyword.
In a lot of cases, I'm throwing in search queries, and going through each result one at a time, and categorizing them; eg penalizing sites that use clickbait or scammy ads, that are low-quality but show up high in results etc, or probably aren't relevant, but are highly SEO optimized, like Pinterest.
These are all image searches "sci-fi combat exoskeleton" -> 7 of 24 top images are Pinterest "zen minimalist clothing" -> 8 of 24 "grav tank concept art" -> 9 of 19
Like many other users in this topic, I run most of my G-Image searches with "-pinterest". I use DDG as my primary non-technical search engine, typically only switching to Google for images, trying to solve error messages, or researching frameworks/APIs/etc.
I really wish there was a non-hacky way to ban sites from Google search results. I also feel like Google's ranking algorithm is utterly broken since it's amenable to this kind of exploitation.
After the option to block domains was removed around 2014-2015, I rarely came across those anymore, but it seems they're back...
Like: personal blocklist https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
But now I learned that Google is suffering the same poor detection. Another 'downside of using DDG debunked', I guess.