They clearly don't give a shit about this problem. Similar issues with Giphy & friends. If they cared they'd de-list sites that present different data to a real user than they do to the Google bot, so that all image search results are directly accessible.
Like other bad Google behavior related to controlling web spam, I reckon this drives more people to see Google ads on these sorts of sites, so they've taken an anti-user position. Same reason much of the "legitimate" web turned up in Google results now looks like a low effort click farm—if the clicks are making Google money, who cares if it's coming from garbage content?
Couldn't agree more about the final sentence. Searching for almost anything (how to guides and recipes are the most obvious examples) returns a SERP of utter rubbish, all clearly designed to farm SEO and clicks. This seems to be what Google wants and desires, because it keeps getting worse.
Alternatively, maybe they do give a shit, but it's easier for 10,000+ companies to hack your SEO than it is for 10,000+ employees to come up with a way to mitigate it.
Agreed. These days it seems in all of my Google searches, after the first third of a page of results, everything is dominated by garbage pages on (presumably) hacked sites filled with SEO bait. They're so obviously gaming the system, I can only presume Google is intentionally looking the other way.
>If they cared they'd de-list sites that present different data to a real user than they do to the Google bot
I'm sure they used to do exactly this. Now, not only do they not do this, but they commit the same sin themselves! Recently I was clicking around Google Images looking for some chart data when I found a promising Google Docs link. Alas, "you must sign in to access this document". Get bent, Google.
Non evidence based conspiracy incoming - how much do you wanna bet there are some individuals who personally profit/profited from Pinterest's success who made these decisions?
If someone built a google scraper that ran that second query in I'm Feeling Lucky mode and just injected that image in place of any pinterest ones - I wonder how quickly they'd rise to internet prominence.
For each result you can see multiple pages that include the image. It also shows the resolution and file size of each version. I did a test search for "bear" and clicked on the first result. It showed 14 different pages containing the same image with different sizes and possibly slightly different crops. You can also select a subsection of the image to search for that.
It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior.
I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content. This is a failing of Google image search for not showing alternate matches for the same image.
Bing has it figured out. I can't tell if Google just doesn't care enough about image search to implement it, or if there's some obscure patent preventing them from doing so.
Google's incentives are not aligned with their users.
They used to recognize that long term it's better to make the decision that the users would want even if it's worse short term. The company was founded on this principle when Larry and Sergey tried to sell pagerank to Overature search (iirc) - the Overature ceo at the time said good results were bad because users would leave the 'portal' page too soon and not see enough ads. That's partly what lead to them creating their own company. [0]
I'd guess Google is making an Overature like mistake today. I guess it could also be failure to operate on stuff like this at scale, which also isn't great.
[0]: I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this from Levy's In The Plex, but I read it years ago so not 100% sure this is accurate.
Rap Genius being the most prominent example.[0] It makes me wonder if Pinterest just has an enormous ad spend with Google and Google is unwilling to risk that.
The best I can steelman is that they're sitting on data that shows users actually want the current behavior which is why it's there (which could be true? I don't know - I'm not the average user).
They'd have to disambiguate that from the obvious motivated reasoning that's likely to exist there too.
Even then, sometimes you know better than users when making long term bets about what you do, faster horses and all - it's part art and part science.
Average users are also not necessarily the best to optimize on. 99% of wikipedia users never write anything. Does that mean the users that write are relatively worthless?
Speaking of Wikipedia, nearly 100% of the time when I Google something medical related I want to get the Wikipedia page for it. Not WebMD or Mayo clinic or whatever. But Google never includes the Wikipedia link (at least on the first page of results), so I have to append “… wiki” to the search. I can only assume this is intentional.
I mean “wiki <search>“ works on Google too. But I don’t want to type anything extra. My problem here is if we assume the search engine should be good at predicting what I actually want to see for a given term, Google is failing at that.
The late 1990s and early 2000s was a silly time because of the portals. I worked for a search engine company that delivered search to a well-known portal and I can remember how much we despised what they did with our technology.
Google was able to break out because they managed to retain great talent and was able to stay funded for a few critical years until their bets paid off. And they did so rather quickly.
I can't help but feel that we're back to a variant of the portal mindset. Only now it is more about B2B and spying on users. And it doesn't feel like Google does anything out of passion anymore. There's really no race to perfect technology - just to be good enough to stay ahead of competition.
The Google of old might have invested in image search to fulfil its potential. The Google of today probably sees it as waste of effort.
Bing's 'rewards' system is also the closest thing I've seen to Lanier's proposal of distributed data ownership - not very close to how he describes it, but closer than anything else I've seen. Microsoft has been impressing me lately.
My summation of the idea is that data is very valuable and will be more valuable in the future, but that because the value of a dataset goes up nonlinearly with its size, only the wealthiest will have the means to extract (significant) value from datasets in the future. This will cause massive societal inequality unless the people who create the data are guaranteed a piece of the value created by companies with the server farms necessary to actually create value out of the data we're constantly producing.
> It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior.
Yandex image search is also great, you can do semantic search by image and crop, much more advanced than Google. It's so good it feels like Pinterest without the fluff and user accounts.
Yandex reverse image search actually does what's it's supposed to, I use it a lot these days.
Google at some point replaced identifying the exact image and finding different sizes/versions into some sort of machine learning problem where it tries (poorly) to identify the content of the image then shows you images that look similar but are usually not what you actually want.
Exactly. Someone online posted an interesting comic book page and I wanted to know what it was from. Google gave me a random word and a bunch of unrelated images. Yandex needed me to use their cropping tool (the image I had was a two page spread), but found it immediately after.
Regardless of "cool or popular" there are legitimate reasons not to want to give Microsoft more power over computing infrastructure. For that matter, there are legitimate reasons not to want to give Google more power as well. In either case, the reasons go well beyond what's fashionable.
Yeah it's not Pinterest, it's Google image search. It's been horrible for many years now, but really got bad when they stopped letting you go straight to the image and instead forcing you to the page the image is on.
Quick tip: sometimes the tiny image thing happens because you right-click to open the image in another tab before it has finished loading in the Google side-column it was in. It's good to give it a moment to fully load, than right-click. Tedious, I know, but helpful maybe.
i waited a full minute before right-click -> open image in new tab, and it still opens the thumbnail-sized image instead of the original. i tried the side-column as well and got the same result.
EDIT: strange, i tried the same process again on the same image and this time it worked! i guess it really is a cache-related issue
Great to hear. I collect historical art images on my computer as idea sparks for my own paint and photo projects, and noted the image loading thing in many of them (others do just load tiny no matter what though).
As an addendum to the point about them being sued, google did something absolutely hilarious in response. They made the "preview image" the ACTUAL IMAGE when you select something, instead of the cache, they only load the cache if the image itself fails to load.
The effect of this is it's in fact muuuuch easier to get at the original image in image search. Just right click the image and hit "view image" or "view image in new tab" and, that's the original.
As mentioned in the article, Pinterest also claims that the problem is Google's:
>A Pinterest spokesperson tells Input that the problem doesn’t lie with the company, but with search engines. “As a search engine, Google controls how results appear based on engagement and how useful searchers find the content.”
> I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content.
That's a bit reductive. I agree Google shares some blame, but Pinterest engages in some pretty serious black hat SEO techniques. This is well documented (and sadly not covered by this article, despite its title).
I also highly recommend Yandex's image search; and, while it is super hard for an English speaker to use, Baidu's is phenomenal... Google is really just the one that sucks at this point.
Not just images. I've noticed that Bing also gives results which helps me fine tune the search terms better to get more accurate results.
Most of the time Google gives me a correct result ONLY if I know exactly what I'm searching for. But that's usually not the case.
Even for technical searches, I notice that many times, Bing gives a more varied search result which helps me.
Conversely, on Google after the first few links, the rest seem to skip some words from my search entirely. It feels as if Google is just trying to give me links to fill up the page and then
I have to go back and put double-quotes against each term. Even after all that, I only get what I want more and more rarely.
Of late, I notice myself relying on Bing more frequently.
When I hit "next page" a lot (because the first page of google results is often crap these days) google gets extremely aggressive about "we've noticed unusual activity from this address" and they make me do a captcha. Well hello! If you'd stop burying the good results I wouldn't have to ask for so many!
And that's yet another reason why I mostly use DDG/Bing now.
After reading [0], I wouldn't want to use Bing without at least a VPN. Not sure if Microsoft has fixed this already, but I don't want to rely on governments/ISPs/anyone on the network knowing the difference between a user-initiated request and an AJAX request for search suggestions.
Google's search is the best in the world. They're just locking it up and cutting its wings so to speak. They flipped a switch a long time ago to stop the image searches being accurate or allowing actual advanced usage. It was scarily good for a while before that.
A simple solution would be to have a “-site” option for the search. The same way you can use “site:.gov” to only return .gov domains, we should be able to “-site:Pinterest.com” to never see that noise again.
The -x modifier in Google is basically a NOT “x” if I understand my Boolean operators correctly. The - can be combined with other operators to NOR instead of AND. Hope that helps.
There's still the issue of false hope. Every now and then I'm looking for something specific that I don't necessarily know what it's called, but I know I'll recognize it when I see it. So I try different queries, and finally find something that looks exactly like it so I click, but end up on Pinterest, where there's generally zero information about the image. It's just a piece of someones random collection. Plus the login-wall of course.
Even the most basic website would have at least some information about the image.
To clarify, this isn't an issue if you get multiple versions of the image, in that case one of them is hopefully not from Pinterest.
doing site:pinterest.com or .co.uk. or .ca can be useful because then you can search through the entire album after finding a relevant result on google
Every site that presents content to search indexing bots, but requires a signup by actual users should be shunned into irrelevancy on the spot. This seems like such shitty behavior that the response to nuke from orbit seems like a no-brainer, I'm not sure why it isn't the default.
I thought Google already had a rule about something like this, that they'd delist your site entirely for breaking. I wonder whether there's a loophole, or if they're just choosing to look the other way here.
I’m curious as to why Google accommodates Pinterest - as far as I know they run their own ads and don’t use Google’s ad network, so I’m not sure what benefit Google gets?
You're probably thinking of the "First Click Free" program, which was intended mainly for news sites, and required those sites to present users with the full content of an article if they arrived on it by clicking on a Google result. This prevented sites from hitting users with a paywall/signup page immediately.
Sadly, Google weakened this principle in 2015 and abandoned it entirely in 2017:
I don't know. This is a difficult balance. If I'm searching for some information I would rather know that it exists behind a paywall and that I can have it if I pay, than not know that it exists at all. As a consumer I want the choice.
They should be shunned by Google itself. Search engines have an actual rule against this. Apparently it's called cloaking: feeding bots one page and users another. It obviously leads to unhappy users who expected one thing and got another.
Pinterest is a walled garden. It nearly wants the data hoarder in me to scrape it using a bespoke script and dump the scraped images on some darkweb forum for a small fee.
The images there all came from somewhere else and are mostly uncredited on pinterest, so that's not really advantageous to anyone, and doesn't really harm pinterest at all.
Google prioritizes results from higher ranking sites. This is what PageRank was all about. It's entirely within Google's power to score Pinterest results lower, pushing them down in the search results. Seems like a Google problem to me, not a Pinterest problem.
Even Pinterest says this is a Google problem. Pinterest can do what the fuck it likes with its web site and how it exposes its HTML to the world - it is Google that needs to decide if it wants these results.
I actually want Google to include these results, but I want it to warn me somehow so that I can make a choice to click on the result or not. If Pinterest is the only possible source for the image then I might make the choice to "pay" Pinternet (by giving them my info) in order to obtain the image.
We've got a former Pinterest employee on this thread describing how they'd specifically manipulated SEO for high SERP rankings. A commercial enterprise doesn't dedicate resources to a "growth SEO team" which coordinates efforts between Pinterest and Google if it doesn't expect a positive benefit from the effort.
But passing the buck to Google for the situation is a manifest and insincere attempt to absolve Pinterest of its culpability and role in precisely the issue TFA is addressing.
No: blame lies squarely with Pinterest, though Google are contributing.
Being manipulated by "SEO hacking" tactics IS a Google problem (or search engine problem) to solve.
Even as far back as the 90s many sites were putting "invisible" paragraphs in their pages to boost site ranking with often completely irrelevant keywords to what was actually on the page.
The early search engines that made it were the ones who put in the engineering effort to filter these kinds of tactics out. Google is just resting on their laurels as top dog in the search space and has been for a very long time.
So, all one needs to do to rise up in Google results is the kind of thing Pinterest is doing, you're saying? Meaning what they are doing works? And has been for years, surviving algo changes by Google?
The question we're discussing is whether or not Pinterest's claim that this is all Google's fault is credible.
If you'd like to have a different discussion, you'll be wanting to have that with someone else.
Yes, Google have a problem.
At best, Pinterest exploited it. At worst, they actively worked with Google for some presumptive mutual benefit, screwing over the rest of the Web community.
Then the pagerank is broken. Millions of daily clicks on their links, two seconds, then back to search results,... this should really bring their pagerank down, because it implies users don't want to stay on that page for more than a few seconds and prefer other results.
As a long-time default-DDG user: DDG doesn't make defining a list of default-excluded sites any easier.
I do run many DDG sites via a bash function (see below). I suppose I could append a list of sites to exclude from results to that, though it would be somewhat ugly. That won't fix searches from a GUI browser though (unless I were to proxy those though some mechanism ... hrm...).
The bash function (any other browser could be substituted, I happen to like w3m):
i extremely reluctantly removed DDG as my default search yesterday. it's been my default for more than a year but the results were so, so consistently worthless even for basic things.
what did you search for? I searched for a few thing like kittens, ducks, and cookies which I figured would have a big contribution from pinterest and I didn't see any at all? On google search of course
Many of my searches these days are just <search terms> reddit. This is especially true when trying to find reviews or recommendations for products I want to buy. I know a lot of companies are gaming things on Reddit, but at least its not 100% like in the results of a general web search. I feel like Reddit is sitting on a literal gold mine here...
The way to fix this, along with most issues I see in modern web search, is for search engines to penalize SEO swindling heavily instead of rewarding it. I dare say it's one of the most destructive and terrible aspects of ad tech.
If it specifically targets Pinterest then maybe. But if they write a general rule (say, penalizing sites that require a login before displaying content I'm looking at you Quora...), or add additional features like perm-blacklisting sites or display more varied image results like Bing/Yandex, that'd get around most anticompetitive accusations
Is there a right to expect honest behaviour in so much as Google will return results which are uncensored and where obvious rule breakers (Google's own rules, that is) are dealt with accordingly?
Sure, I can see that maybe if it's your best vendor and their product makes you a lot of money you can tolerate some poop on the floor occasionally...
...but if you decide to ban them I don't think anyone would ever consider it an "abuse of power" would they? Your service came with an element that's detrimental to my own... that seems like reasonable grounds for a ban.
I think this starts to approach conversations about how big is "too big." If a company or product is so large that a simple ban for bad behavior can be considered "abuse of power" then maybe that product represents too much of the market.
No, I don't think so - assuming they had user feedback to back up their decision. It's sort of similar to a convienence store specifically stopping stocking of Nestle brand waters over customer complaints.
It'd be a lot safer of them to just ban the behavior though and create a rule.
They're already doing such things, and have been since the beginning. It's a standard quality monitoring and tuning of the ranking algorithm. Google even has (outsourced) staff that continuously performs searches and gives feedback. Sites that Google doesn't deem appropriate for their search results are regularly removed both algorithmically and via manual interventions.
There's no objective ranking. Every algorithm change is effectively Google's decision against someone's site.
Google has been caught abusing this responsibility with preferential treatment of AMP pages, due to AMP giving preferential treatment to Google's ads. Google knows Pinterest is blatantly spamming search, so they must have a reason for keeping them.
Ugh, Pinterest is the experts-exchange of images. But there's a very straightforward way for Google to deal with Pinterext, and Medium, and Quora, and sign-up-only newspapers and magazines. Google just needs a preferences checkbox that says "Remove all sites which present themselves differently if they know GoogleBot is accessing them."
Yeah, why not? Index every page twice. If the non-bot result is materially different, rank the site lower. If the site is not accessible as a regular user, remove it from results entirely.
Obviously. This is not some technical marvel we're talking about. Google already tells you how to verify the site visitor is Googlebot[1], practically telling the world how to do cloaking. Google employees know Quora, Pinterest, etc. are gaming their system. This has nothing to do with trivial technical solutions and everything to do with business incentives.
Sorry, but that's putting a heck of a lot of trust/faith/expectations in G actually paying attention to said feedback from said system. Expecting G to self police is just a non-starter as we clearly see people getting away with things now. Self-policing never works.
With a few very rare exceptions - the content is always available at a higher resolution and more easily accessible at a different site. Pinterest is just a blackhole that photos go to to die.
Why would Pinterest want to do this? Of course they want the traffic. Pinterest are actually doing nothing wrong here, IMO. They are simply exposing their HTML to the world and Google is coming along and deciding to index it in their own way.
Flickr has always done the same in my experience. Any attempt at viewing the source image always resulted in a redirect to Flickr's shitty landing page.
Currently Flickr overrides right click with a zoom 'feature.'
Fortunately however - depending on the license - you can trivially download various sizes of images (including "original") with a click, using Flickr's context menu to choose between the image sizes. That seems like a reasonable approach.
Pinterest strips away the original context of the image. You cannot follow or like the artist who created the image. You cannot find out what it's an image _of_! Any value the image had to its creator as an advertisement or portfolio piece are gone. It is a leech and an information black hole all in one.
A couple of years ago, Pinterest had hacked Google's SEO so completely that they polluted even my non-image search results. Fortunately this is no longer the case.
Since we're on the subject of pinterest, do their users get some mileage out of the social features as opposed to just downloading e.g. PureRef and creating a locally hosted board? Serious question, I don't quite understand what they're offering.
I find this line of argument very unconvincing because it has nothing to do with Pinterest.
> Pinterest, it should be noted, doesn’t cost anything to sign up for. But as the old internet maxim goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.’” Meanwhile, people who do use the service complain that the resolution of Pinterest images is often low.
It's annoying to make an account, but they are paying to host the image. That you want a particular image is already tracked by the other image hosts. It does not seem like a net loss of privacy.
One possibility is that Pinterest is really actually very popular and the people who reasonably hate the awful site are in the minority (which sucks for us but it's hard to be critical of their images coming up often). The other possibility is everyone hates Pinterest and Google is allowing their search to get gamed - and in that case the ball seems in Google's court? Like, your users hate your search, fix it.
Either way it seems like yelling at Pinterest for "ruining" photo search in one particular way is silly. They have either been so successful as to redefine how people want to access images or they're cheating.
if you use ublock origin, you can permanently remove pinterest results in google images with the following filter:
www.google.com##.isv-r:has-text(/pinterest.com/)
shameless plug: i've been maintaining a browser extension for a couple of years called 'google images restored' [0] which reverts google images to how it was before 2019. that extension, mixed with the ublock origin filter removing unwanted domains (pinterest, alamy, 123rf, etc), makes google images enjoyable again for me.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadLike other bad Google behavior related to controlling web spam, I reckon this drives more people to see Google ads on these sorts of sites, so they've taken an anti-user position. Same reason much of the "legitimate" web turned up in Google results now looks like a low effort click farm—if the clicks are making Google money, who cares if it's coming from garbage content?
I'm sure they used to do exactly this. Now, not only do they not do this, but they commit the same sin themselves! Recently I was clicking around Google Images looking for some chart data when I found a promising Google Docs link. Alas, "you must sign in to access this document". Get bent, Google.
For each result you can see multiple pages that include the image. It also shows the resolution and file size of each version. I did a test search for "bear" and clicked on the first result. It showed 14 different pages containing the same image with different sizes and possibly slightly different crops. You can also select a subsection of the image to search for that.
It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior.
I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content. This is a failing of Google image search for not showing alternate matches for the same image.
Bing has it figured out. I can't tell if Google just doesn't care enough about image search to implement it, or if there's some obscure patent preventing them from doing so.
They used to recognize that long term it's better to make the decision that the users would want even if it's worse short term. The company was founded on this principle when Larry and Sergey tried to sell pagerank to Overature search (iirc) - the Overature ceo at the time said good results were bad because users would leave the 'portal' page too soon and not see enough ads. That's partly what lead to them creating their own company. [0]
I'd guess Google is making an Overature like mistake today. I guess it could also be failure to operate on stuff like this at scale, which also isn't great.
[0]: I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this from Levy's In The Plex, but I read it years ago so not 100% sure this is accurate.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
They'd have to disambiguate that from the obvious motivated reasoning that's likely to exist there too.
Even then, sometimes you know better than users when making long term bets about what you do, faster horses and all - it's part art and part science.
Average users are also not necessarily the best to optimize on. 99% of wikipedia users never write anything. Does that mean the users that write are relatively worthless?
!w <search> to search Wikipedia directly.
(semi-joking... but complaining about typing 3-5 letters is definitely a 1st world problem ;)
That is to say that Google image search is the real problem and not Pinterest.
Google was able to break out because they managed to retain great talent and was able to stay funded for a few critical years until their bets paid off. And they did so rather quickly.
I can't help but feel that we're back to a variant of the portal mindset. Only now it is more about B2B and spying on users. And it doesn't feel like Google does anything out of passion anymore. There's really no race to perfect technology - just to be good enough to stay ahead of competition.
The Google of old might have invested in image search to fulfil its potential. The Google of today probably sees it as waste of effort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHt98WE5FxU
My summation of the idea is that data is very valuable and will be more valuable in the future, but that because the value of a dataset goes up nonlinearly with its size, only the wealthiest will have the means to extract (significant) value from datasets in the future. This will cause massive societal inequality unless the people who create the data are guaranteed a piece of the value created by companies with the server farms necessary to actually create value out of the data we're constantly producing.
Yandex image search is also great, you can do semantic search by image and crop, much more advanced than Google. It's so good it feels like Pinterest without the fluff and user accounts.
Google at some point replaced identifying the exact image and finding different sizes/versions into some sort of machine learning problem where it tries (poorly) to identify the content of the image then shows you images that look similar but are usually not what you actually want.
EDIT: strange, i tried the same process again on the same image and this time it worked! i guess it really is a cache-related issue
The effect of this is it's in fact muuuuch easier to get at the original image in image search. Just right click the image and hit "view image" or "view image in new tab" and, that's the original.
What's annoying though is that Google doesn't show you the image sizes anymore. That's also relatively recent.
>A Pinterest spokesperson tells Input that the problem doesn’t lie with the company, but with search engines. “As a search engine, Google controls how results appear based on engagement and how useful searchers find the content.”
Google: "We allow shitty things because money."
Pinterest: "also money."
That's a bit reductive. I agree Google shares some blame, but Pinterest engages in some pretty serious black hat SEO techniques. This is well documented (and sadly not covered by this article, despite its title).
Except when images are scrubbed from results, such as "Tank Man."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
Microsoft blamed "accidental human error": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400774
Most of the time Google gives me a correct result ONLY if I know exactly what I'm searching for. But that's usually not the case.
Even for technical searches, I notice that many times, Bing gives a more varied search result which helps me.
Conversely, on Google after the first few links, the rest seem to skip some words from my search entirely. It feels as if Google is just trying to give me links to fill up the page and then I have to go back and put double-quotes against each term. Even after all that, I only get what I want more and more rarely.
Of late, I notice myself relying on Bing more frequently.
And that's yet another reason why I mostly use DDG/Bing now.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2gzi9/bing_searc... and https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2q4kw/rebing_sea...
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
Even the most basic website would have at least some information about the image.
To clarify, this isn't an issue if you get multiple versions of the image, in that case one of them is hopefully not from Pinterest.
Pinterest goes out of their way to make this operation annoying.
Sadly, Google weakened this principle in 2015 and abandoned it entirely in 2017:
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2015/09/first-clic...
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...
Google doesn't care anymore.
I actually want Google to include these results, but I want it to warn me somehow so that I can make a choice to click on the result or not. If Pinterest is the only possible source for the image then I might make the choice to "pay" Pinternet (by giving them my info) in order to obtain the image.
We've got a former Pinterest employee on this thread describing how they'd specifically manipulated SEO for high SERP rankings. A commercial enterprise doesn't dedicate resources to a "growth SEO team" which coordinates efforts between Pinterest and Google if it doesn't expect a positive benefit from the effort.
But passing the buck to Google for the situation is a manifest and insincere attempt to absolve Pinterest of its culpability and role in precisely the issue TFA is addressing.
No: blame lies squarely with Pinterest, though Google are contributing.
Even as far back as the 90s many sites were putting "invisible" paragraphs in their pages to boost site ranking with often completely irrelevant keywords to what was actually on the page.
The early search engines that made it were the ones who put in the engineering effort to filter these kinds of tactics out. Google is just resting on their laurels as top dog in the search space and has been for a very long time.
But I'm repeating myself. Disengenuous argument is disengenuous.
Would that not be a first?
If you'd like to have a different discussion, you'll be wanting to have that with someone else.
Yes, Google have a problem.
At best, Pinterest exploited it. At worst, they actively worked with Google for some presumptive mutual benefit, screwing over the rest of the Web community.
Either way, Pinterest are culpable.
The proper response is to cut Pinterest out of search results.
Everyone, and their immediate family.
That's quite communist, don't you find?
I do run many DDG sites via a bash function (see below). I suppose I could append a list of sites to exclude from results to that, though it would be somewhat ugly. That won't fix searches from a GUI browser though (unless I were to proxy those though some mechanism ... hrm...).
The bash function (any other browser could be substituted, I happen to like w3m):
https://millionshort.com/
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
...but if you decide to ban them I don't think anyone would ever consider it an "abuse of power" would they? Your service came with an element that's detrimental to my own... that seems like reasonable grounds for a ban.
I think this starts to approach conversations about how big is "too big." If a company or product is so large that a simple ban for bad behavior can be considered "abuse of power" then maybe that product represents too much of the market.
It'd be a lot safer of them to just ban the behavior though and create a rule.
There's no objective ranking. Every algorithm change is effectively Google's decision against someone's site.
Google has been caught abusing this responsibility with preferential treatment of AMP pages, due to AMP giving preferential treatment to Google's ads. Google knows Pinterest is blatantly spamming search, so they must have a reason for keeping them.
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
Rather than having a system that looks like what I've just outlined and taking no notice whatsoever.
But who owns that market? Google.
I guess they've never heard of noindex? You can very easily remove your content from Google image search, you just like all the traffic.
Fortunately however - depending on the license - you can trivially download various sizes of images (including "original") with a click, using Flickr's context menu to choose between the image sizes. That seems like a reasonable approach.
> Pinterest, it should be noted, doesn’t cost anything to sign up for. But as the old internet maxim goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.’” Meanwhile, people who do use the service complain that the resolution of Pinterest images is often low.
It's annoying to make an account, but they are paying to host the image. That you want a particular image is already tracked by the other image hosts. It does not seem like a net loss of privacy.
One possibility is that Pinterest is really actually very popular and the people who reasonably hate the awful site are in the minority (which sucks for us but it's hard to be critical of their images coming up often). The other possibility is everyone hates Pinterest and Google is allowing their search to get gamed - and in that case the ball seems in Google's court? Like, your users hate your search, fix it.
Either way it seems like yelling at Pinterest for "ruining" photo search in one particular way is silly. They have either been so successful as to redefine how people want to access images or they're cheating.
www.google.com##.isv-r:has-text(/pinterest.com/)
shameless plug: i've been maintaining a browser extension for a couple of years called 'google images restored' [0] which reverts google images to how it was before 2019. that extension, mixed with the ublock origin filter removing unwanted domains (pinterest, alamy, 123rf, etc), makes google images enjoyable again for me.
[0] https://github.com/fanfare/googleimagesrestored
duckduckgo.com##.tile:has-text(/pinterest.com/)