Live data from Hacker News

“Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

reddit.com

241–250 of 278 posts

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

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Google search results reflect content on the web" That's what's being violated. The GoogleBot gets the content, but not a human visiting the site. That's not what a user expects. That's why Pinterest and LinkedIn should be removed from Google search indexes. Addendum We're not even talking about violating Google's T&C here. It's about how their ranking algorithm works. Try building a site and applying similar blac…

You could make the same argument about the New York Times, WSJ, the Economist, FT, and many other newspapers of record: the Googlebot gets the content, and the users get a login page if they don't have an account. Should Google get rid of those as well? How can a search engine be useful if it doesn't include the most popular sites?

News aggregation operates under a very different model, and Google is constantly negotiating with news vendors.

>How can a search engine be useful if it doesn't include the most popular sites?

News has a relatively tiny set of providers. Information has a massive set of providers. Hence why Google can call the shots if you want to be in their engine. Pinterest only recently started getting ranked highly, owing to a weighting change, and it is a negative result for almost everyone.

You repeatedly keep citing the results themselves as validation that the results are correct. That isn't how it works, especially in the face of users saying "these Pinterest results suck and reduce my experience". Google constantly changes these things.

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

#242

I don't see why Pinterest does this to themselves. My main exposure to them is through Google image search and links to their site. So my first several experiences were like this. It left me with a terrible first impression. It makes me wonder if the whole site plays games and tries to waste my time. I usually don't sign up for an account the first few times I encounter a site, so in my mind it's a pretty critical ti…

One of the things that makes me a little bonkers is when people A/B test, find something that works well for, say, 50% of the people, and then dust off their hands and call it done. Because 50% is a lot of people, so it must be good. I'd rather that they ask, "Hey, is there something that would be good for the other half of the users?" Software being infinitely soft, we can often find ways to serve both groups. If Pi…

50% is overselling the success rate of login-walls from Google Images by a lot - probably multiple orders of magnitude. And I think you're significantly misrepresenting the A/B test's goal. It's not to find what works best for the most people, it's to find what works best for the company running the test.

If a login wall causes an account creation from 0.5% of people presented with the bait-and-switch, that's not compared to a 99.5% failure rate. It's contrasted with an account creation from 0.1% of people presented with the image they wanted with a "Click here to create an account" prompt in the corner, and it's five times as effective as that alternative.

The same story gets repeated here over and over again regarding the email newsletter sign-up form that steals focus halfway through a blog post. Yes, they increase your traceable readership more than anything else you could put in your blog (again, counting 1% vs 0.1%) . But there is a large percentage of the population who will close your blog permanently if you use them.

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

#243
There were some ways to block Pinterest continuous pestering for subscription, but it got annoying and rather than supporting a model I consider unfair to the users I removed them from my surfing list.

It should also be noted that most problems I read on the commentary here would be easily solved if Google re-enabled the discussion filter they conveniently removed years ago to prevent users to filter out commercial sites from their queries. That move was pure evil and thanks to it searching has become harder than before.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/Psb...

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...

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

#245

Meanwhile perhaps the Personal Blocklist by Google ads-on for Chrome can help? Not sure if it works on image search also. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

Whether it works or not, if you think a bit about it, you need to use a google product (chrome) to correct a dis-service that google is making.

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

#246
post #82
post #56

I agree that it's quite annoying, but you can already remove it yourself from the search results by adding "-site:pinterest.com" in the query.

I don't want to do that each time, plus pininterset.in or .br will takes it's place.

Do `-site:pinterest.*` to block all domains.

But I agree, I also don’t want to have to do that every time.

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

#247
post #186

The most infuriating case is the reverse-image search. When I use reverse search for an image I'm trying to find a source or a complete version or context for an image flying about on social media. And what I get is often a solid wall of Pinterest hits providing zero info.

>The most infuriating case is the reverse-image search.

Exactly, that is also in my experience when it is the most frustrating.

On "normal" searches (let's say searching for an electronic device of some kind, hoping to find the manufacturer/support/specs) what I find increasingly disturbing is the number of links for Amazon offerings.

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

#249
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 know it’s not a popular opinion, but I actually like W3schools. Most of their infamous errors are gone and they are usually more “to the point” than Mozilla docs, which are a sometimes too prolific and not as clear.

I like W3schools too, you're correct it's better these days. The site has helped me a lot when I needed to quickly get help usually with CSS or HTML. I like the "try it yourself" feature, and the examples are usually good. Not sure how good it is for JS and Jquery, I usually use Jquery.com and stackoverflow for JS.

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

#250
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...

Both are good and I use both. There's something about the layout of w3schools I find nicer and quicker to read. Sometimes I spend about 10 seconds on the site and I'm done. That's the mark of a good UI when you're in and out in 10 seconds with the info you need.
Post reply on HN