Live data from Hacker News

“Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

reddit.com

121–130 of 278 posts

Re: “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

#121
It's just not good for the world that a single company controls a basic fundamental function of the internet. It needs fixing.

Google Search needs to be replaced by an open source decentralized system. And then users themselves can control which sites do well and which don't.

Re: “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

#122
post #39

While they are at it please remove LinkedIn. You can't actually view anything on any page without logging in. Why is it listed at all? Seems pretty deceptive to me.

And how about Google finally do something about Quora's aggressive abuse of their quality guidelines:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

Quora presents a very different site to Google than it does to the reader ultimately. Google intentionally, knowingly ignores this fact and has for years. They could manually penalize Quora for breaking Google's search quality guidelines in numerous ways and they choose not to.

A user can't freely browse Quora page to page, whereas Google can. Presenting a different site to Google than you do to the user, is about as direct of a violation of their guidelines as you can get.

Re: “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

#123
post #39

While they are at it please remove LinkedIn. You can't actually view anything on any page without logging in. Why is it listed at all? Seems pretty deceptive to me.

LinkedIn is one of the top sites for dark UX patterns. It is 100% purposeful, just like Pinterest, and designed to increase the all important "engagement" metric.

Re: “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

#124

I don't see the problem here. The most popular sites are showing up in search results. Pinterest is a popular site. It seems like that's the way search engines are supposed to work. If you don't like the fact that Pinterest is a popular site, fair enough -- but that's a personal opinion, and it's not a good enough reason for Google or any other search engine to suppress Pinterest images in search results.

> The most popular sites are showing up in search results. Pinterest is a popular site. It seems like that's the way search engines are supposed to work.

I disagree. Search engines are supposed to find _useful_ sites. Every time I have come across a Pinterest link, I have either been presented with the image devoid of context or (much more commonly) asked to log in and just been presented with a generic list of Pinterest images. That isn't useful (and in fact actively frustrates what I'm trying to do).

Edit: typo fix.

Re: “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

#126
post #108
post #39

While they are at it please remove LinkedIn. You can't actually view anything on any page without logging in. Why is it listed at all? Seems pretty deceptive to me.

Oh and w3schools.com needs to go below MDN because it's less informative. Even today I wanted to read about transform-origin and landed on w3schools [0], where MDN article [1] is clearly superior. [0] https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_transform-origin.as... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/transform-o...

I use the personal blocklist extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...) just to block w3schools.

Re: “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

#127
post #92
post #39

While they are at it please remove LinkedIn. You can't actually view anything on any page without logging in. Why is it listed at all? Seems pretty deceptive to me.

If you come with a google referrer you can still see the basic information of a profile.

Even if that's true, that means LinkedIn is presenting a different site to the reader than they are to the search engine spiders, which breaks Google's guidelines and should be heavily penalized accordingly (as it would be for any mortals).

Google can spider every page freely, going from link to link without having to sign up. A regular user can't. Where's the penalty from Google for that? Why is so much LinkedIn content indexed when the user can't have the same experience as Google does? It's very blatant hypocrisy.

Re: “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

#128
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh and w3schools.com needs to go below MDN because it's less informative. Even today I wanted to read about transform-origin and landed on w3schools [0], where MDN article [1] is clearly superior. [0] https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_transform-origin.as... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/transform-o...

I use the personal blocklist extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist... ) just to block w3schools.

Exactly the same here!

Re: “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

#129
post #108
post #39

While they are at it please remove LinkedIn. You can't actually view anything on any page without logging in. Why is it listed at all? Seems pretty deceptive to me.

Oh and w3schools.com needs to go below MDN because it's less informative. Even today I wanted to read about transform-origin and landed on w3schools [0], where MDN article [1] is clearly superior. [0] https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_transform-origin.as... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/transform-o...

Back when I was writing a lot of C++ professionally I felt the same way about cplusplus.com vs. the (IMO much superior) cppreference.com. I'd love to be able to teach my search engine simple rules like "if a Wikipedia article matches my search, show it first" or "never show results from linkedin".

Re: “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third sentence explicitly states what rule Pinterest breaks....

That's not one of Google's rules, as far as I can tell. Here are some of Google's rules: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/open-we... Some might say that Pinterest's behavior is covered under the "Spam and Malware" section on that page, but clearly Google does not agree with that interpretation of Google's rules or else the search results would have been removed by now. There are other sites requir…

Webmaster Guidelines - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769

> Avoid the following techniques: [...] Creating pages with little or no original content [...] Cloaking

arguably apply to Pinterest to varying degrees. Specifically:

> Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

Different results than what I expect is 100% how I would categorise my encounters with Pinterest in Google results.

Post reply on HN