[HN Gopher] Pinterest ruined photo search on the internet
___________________________________________________________________
Pinterest ruined photo search on the internet
Author : spyke112
Score : 475 points
Date : 2021-11-08 16:36 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.inputmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.inputmag.com)
| sweetbitter wrote:
| Is it really so bad that a malicious, anti-user company such as
| Google is being harmed by another malicious service?
| nataz wrote:
| Hmmm, this is odd. I used to have an issue with Pinterest, but
| somehow I found a setting to remove from search results. Am I
| just a lucky a/b test?
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Where? I literally said in another comment that I'd pay for a
| service that does this:D
| canadianwriter wrote:
| "As a search engine, Google controls how results appear based on
| engagement and how useful searchers find the content."
|
| 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.
| kingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I'd pay for a search engine that would allow me me to
| automatically exclude certain domains from search results.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Bing image search has solved this problem.
|
| 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.
| loudmax wrote:
| 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.
| sweetbitter wrote:
| What do you propose, a distributed search engine like YaCy?
| concinds wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2gzi9/bing_searc...
| and
| https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2q4kw/rebing_sea...
| thatsnotmepls wrote:
| I just opened bing and saw a bear on my homepage, what magic is
| this?
| Miner49er wrote:
| 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.
| thrashh wrote:
| They only did that because they got sued.
| oehpr wrote:
| 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.
| dsizzle wrote:
| 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."
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Pinterest: "we're only doing shitty things because Google
| lets us manipulate search results by doing shitty things. "
|
| Google: "We allow shitty things because money."
|
| Pinterest: "also money."
| csapdani wrote:
| 'Right click -> Open image in new tab' still works.
| muspimerol wrote:
| This doesn't always give you the full size image. Often you
| have to visit the page, then search to find the image, then
| get the source.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| 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.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Also, Bing's censorship algorithms are much weaker than
| Google's, so you get more results from more risque sites.
| visarga wrote:
| > 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 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.
| taneq wrote:
| Huh, Yandex does it too? I've been using TinEye for years
| and years for this.
| gs17 wrote:
| 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.
| ilamont wrote:
| > Bing has it figured out.
|
| 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
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Jup, bing is so much better than google for image search.
| mdoms wrote:
| > 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).
| fossuser wrote:
| 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.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Yeah google has by fiat down ranked entire classes of results
| and companies therein many many times... And yet Pinterest is
| exempt?
| lelandfe wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Or it could be risk of monopoly-related lawsuits, right?
| fossuser wrote:
| 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?
| thunderbong wrote:
| 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.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 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.
| kyleee wrote:
| Same thing happens to me. It just goes to show the disdain
| they have for users who don't just click an ad on the front
| page like they want
| saurik wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| 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.
| GordonS wrote:
| I'm not familiar with this - can you provide a short summary
| of what it is, or point towards a link please?
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| This is a good link - I used an outdated term, he uses the
| term 'data dignity' now.
|
| 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.
| cloud226 wrote:
| Or you can try search in Pinterest
| munk-a wrote:
| I generally want to actually save interesting images I find -
| and not to another Pinterest board.
|
| Pinterest goes out of their way to make this operation
| annoying.
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://github.com/fanfare/googleimagesrestored
| 9679467j9464 wrote:
| Here's one for DDG:
|
| duckduckgo.com##.tile:has-text(/pinterest.com/)
| rob74 wrote:
| Pinterest may be the most annoying, but by far not the only ones
| who try to coax you into signing up. The most annoying for me is
| Facebook because of the many businesses that are too lazy or
| cheap to have a proper homepage and put up a "public" Facebook
| page instead. Well guess what: if you're not signed in to
| Facebook, you get an obnoxious "sign in or sign up" popup on
| these pages which you can't dismiss completely, it will stick to
| the bottom of your browser window and take up valuable screen
| real estate...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Loathe though I am to say anything positive about Facebook: I
| don't find my general Web search results overly spammed with
| Facebook pages, whether accessible or not.
|
| Facebook seems to me to be actively search-hostile (it has no
| sitemaps pages --- there are none listed at
| https://facebook.com/robots.txt), and returns relatively few
| web search results compared to its alleged size (5 _billion_
| submissions per day last I heard).
|
| That's ... in marked contrast to Pinterest, which actively
| solicits SEO and is overwhelmingly prevalent in image search
| results.
| nyxaiur wrote:
| Poison the wells until yours is the only one with clean water.
| derekp7 wrote:
| The trick I do is to use one of the returned images in a reverse
| Google photo search, and include a "-pinterest.com" tag. But that
| takes extra steps.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| kiryin wrote:
| 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.
| wackget wrote:
| 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.
| adventured wrote:
| 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.
| nielsbot wrote:
| FWIW, you can add `-site:pinterest.com` to your google search to
| filter these out. (Or just `-pinterest`)
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| If Google deprioritized or entirely removed Pinterest images
| based on this feedback, wouldn't that be seen as an abuse of
| power? (Honest question)
| rahidz wrote:
| 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
| genewitch wrote:
| Is there an absolute right to be indexed by Google or
| something?
| dazc wrote:
| 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?
|
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelin
| e...
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| If a vendor walks into my store and poops all over the floor,
| would banning their product be an abuse of power?
| LanceH wrote:
| For a lot of people -- apparently -- the answer to that
| question can vary based upon their association with the
| perpetrator.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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.
| pornel wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| uBlacklist is a good personal level mitigation to Pinterest
| problem. Just FYI.
| paulpauper wrote:
| 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
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > The spokesperson did provide some guidance "For those who would
| like to see Pinterest content from Google Search without signing
| in..."
|
| By "Pinterest content" you of course mean, other peoples images
| you don't own but have harvested?
| zarmin wrote:
| Cue Pinterest NFTs
| dopa42365 wrote:
| I recommend the uBlacklist browser extension
| (https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/) and simply block pinterest
| as well as all the stock image sites.
| bane wrote:
| I have a chrome extension called "unpinterested" that adds
| -site:pinterest.* to all of my google searches. It's effectively
| solved lots of the pinterest problems.
|
| The _real_ issue of course is that google is once again
| tolerating a site that allows indexing but won 't allow linking
| to the actual content (used to be a problem with experts exchange
| IIR). Instead pinterest redirects to their page instead of the
| image.
|
| Pinterest is index cancer.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| BS. This can be solved by how to design the UX among other ways.
| This problem is not equal over search engines as well. There are
| other things that annoys me more like Google and the problems
| with N-Grams.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Do any dudes actually use Pinterest? Seriously (sort of).
| npsimons wrote:
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| 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.
| sltkr wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2015/09/first-
| clic...
|
| https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-
| initiat...
| leephillips wrote:
| Google doesn't apply its rules to the big players; they
| generate a lot of ad revenue.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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?
| kingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Needs a switch like "Avoid tolls" in Maps
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
|
| Google doesn't care anymore.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| sysadm1n wrote:
| 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.
| joemi wrote:
| 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.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Some of them have gone away from the original URL, or from
| the web entirely.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| 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."
| dylan604 wrote:
| But how does googlebot know that? after indexing with
| googlebot, rescan as pinky-swear-not-googlebot?
| danuker wrote:
| You could look for special treatment in robots.txt. But that
| wouldn't show you what the server would say if you had a
| different user-agent.
| dazc wrote:
| Maybe have some way of people reporting this behaviour and
| taking action when a critical mass of complaints point to one
| publisher?
|
| Rather than having a system that looks like what I've just
| outlined and taking no notice whatsoever.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Would you run that from different servers/IPs in case site
| owners attempt to deny pinky-swear-not-googlebot?
| deckard1 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/cr
| awling/...
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I think "cloaking" is the term.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Back in the day (grumble grumble) this was grounds for being
| delisted from google entirely.
| thinkling wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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.
| kingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Pinterest's response is noncredible.
|
| 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.
| pyb wrote:
| 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.
| cletus wrote:
| Pinterest seems like such a squandered opportunity to me. It's
| classic short term thinking vs long term vision.
|
| I basically ignore any Pinterest links because they're just shoe
| pages and a login trap driven by mindlessly chasing engagement
| metrics.
|
| It's Experts Exchange that was wiped out by Stack Overflow.
|
| The costs of this should be low. If YouTube can host videos
| basically for free and without forcing you to login, Pinterest
| can host a free links and images.
|
| Make your site easy to use and a C pleasure to use and you build
| long term loyalty, behavior and engagement. The way they're doing
| it screams of bad product management where engagement inevitably
| drops and any number of external factors will be blamed. Google
| downranking, competition, Facebook/Instagram, whatever. Never any
| internal failure.
|
| Basically the Yelp playbook for the last decade.
| joshenders wrote:
| 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
| solarkraft wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| Can you give me the user story for this?
| joshenders wrote:
| Please elaborate
| roughly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hosteur wrote:
| Do you think Pinterest is a net positive value for the web?
| joshenders wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| joshenders wrote:
| > 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.
| mission_failed wrote:
| How do you facilitate context when every single link takes
| you to a forced login screen with no context showing of the
| image link you clicked?
| joshenders wrote:
| As a logged in user, this isn't the experience but as a
| logged out user the signup nag can be closed or ignored.
| Often times Pinterest has a copy of the image and
| metadata when the original site may be offline.
| dang wrote:
| 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)
|
| 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=.
| ..
| jordigh wrote:
| I reworded my comment. Is that better?
| dang wrote:
| It's certainly better but it's still not great.
| qwertox wrote:
| "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".
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 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.
| joshenders wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective but I don't think it's
| well calibrated for the modern web.
| qwertox wrote:
| I'd settle with Google marking any link to a paywalled site
| (including news articles behind a paywall) as an ad.
| joshenders wrote:
| I don't think you'd be very satisfied with your remaining
| search results.
| andrewzah wrote:
| You can append -pinterest to any search. That works well
| enough usually.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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... they just happen to
| all be "search optimized" and "proxied" by the same company,
| Pinterest.
|
| Sign up is free but if you'd rather not, just close the sign
| up nag.
| voldacar wrote:
| You have made the internet worse
|
| hope it paid well
| joshenders wrote:
| Disagree. If you want to debate me, let's hear your argument.
| hosteur wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ladberg wrote:
| Do you know what Google's incentive was for participating in
| those meetings?
| joshenders wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What was Google's incentive for engaging with Pinterest? Does
| Pinterest pay Google for favored rankings?
| joshenders wrote:
| No. We absolutely did not pay for ranking or anything like
| that.
| grae_QED wrote:
| Have you ever felt a similar frustration outlined in the
| article? Specifically Pinterest image result clutter?
| joshenders wrote:
| 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.
| friedman23 wrote:
| Why do you think google enables this behavior? My guess is that
| the content from pinterest is actually relevant for the user.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| My guess is they do what generates the most ad clicks.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Does Pinterest run Google ads? As far as I know that's not
| the case so why would Google favor them?
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| dazc wrote:
| I'd rather find the original content, Google could help me with
| this instead.
| rebuilder wrote:
| 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.
| Jedd wrote:
| I may be misremembering, but I am quietly confident that about 15
| years ago I could instruct google to _remember_ a list of sites
| that I wanted excluded from any of my search results.
|
| I definitely recall that up until about 10 years ago ebay had a
| similar feature, where I could define various vendors that I
| wanted to exclude forever after.
|
| Ebay has the two-master problem in spades, of course, but
| removing these types of features is an especially non-subtle
| reminder that as a consumer you're very low down on the
| corporation's care list.
|
| Having to manually modify _all_ my search queries forever more is
| an offensive cognitive burden.
| mikestew wrote:
| _I may be misremembering..._
|
| You remember just fine, and probably got it to within a year or
| two. If google wanted to make money off something other than
| the ads I never click (if they even managed to be displayed):
| bring back the list, and name a reasonable price.
|
| Because even though Pinterest will never resolve on our home
| network (lest you accidentally click a search result), there's
| no way I can find to not display those results to begin with.
| We need a Pi-Hole for search results.
| noasaservice wrote:
| It would be much better to exclude domains in search.
|
| But who owns that market? Google.
| amelius wrote:
| No, Google ruined it by upranking Pinterest, even while users
| clearly don't want Pinterest results.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Yandex image search for the win.
| [deleted]
| quitit wrote:
| Ah yes, searching for anything in 2021 looks like: <search terms>
| -amazon -ebay -pinterest etc
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's Million Short:
|
| https://millionshort.com/
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I just use DDG.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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): ddg () {
| /usr/bin/w3m "https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q=$*&kd=-1" }
| time0ut wrote:
| 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...
| xattt wrote:
| This would be a great addition to the default search string in
| your browser of choice for your search engine of choice.
| postalrat wrote:
| And how google allowed it to happen. Even after they said they
| are opposed to the behavior.
| handrous wrote:
| 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?
| dTal wrote:
| >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.
| aigo wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| coldpie wrote:
| This is why using ad blockers is more ethical than not. The
| sooner we destroy ad-based business models, the sooner we
| can find a model that works.
| kjs3 wrote:
| 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.
| mbesto wrote:
| 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?
| khazhoux wrote:
| It's frankly shocking that Google Product Manager allows this
| to happen. I'm not exaggerating to wonder if the PM even looks
| at their own product.
| yalogin wrote:
| Google probably had a deal with Pinterest to keep them in the
| search results. Pinterest needs it to get user sign ups and so
| doesn't mind paying
| dazc wrote:
| This would go against the don't do evil mantra though?
| cole-k wrote:
| Forgive me, for I have become the Hacker News curmudgeon and
| armchair-know-it-all.
|
| Subject matter aside, this piece's journalism brought me much
| ire.
|
| Did they really need Pinterest's failed acquisition to
| contextualize this article? It's not even discussed save for a
| throwaway comment at the end. Pinterest has been an annoyance to
| image searchers for a long time, are they suggesting that somehow
| PayPal didn't know, and upon discovery they too concluded,
| "Pinterest sucks and it has utterly ruined photo searching on the
| internet."
|
| Is a HN thread with 24 upvotes now a means of "pleading" with
| Google engineers [0]?
|
| Am I just getting mad at a low-quality, click-baity online
| magazine?
|
| [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546202
| toephu2 wrote:
| I just typed 'scarf' in Google's image search and didn't see a
| single Pinterest link?
| aeturnum wrote:
| 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.
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