You can search with adding `-pinterest` to remove all that noise.
Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
21–30 of 329 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#22I do not know whether Google gives Pinterest preferential treatment. That said, I'd like to know: What are you searching? Results will be different depending on if you're searching "cute bedroom ideas" or "epistemology in pre-Socratic Greece."
Ha good question! I run a company that builds visual search engines and one of the sites I build and develop is a colour search engine for lipsticks. One of the main ways people discover it is through Google searches so I was studying which sites rank highest for queries like "nyx budapest lipstick dupes" etc. So yeah, for sure, queries for stuff that lends itself well to visual curation will be full of Pinterest results unlike stuff about Greek philosophy.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#23There's no intentional or manual effort at Google to promote pinterest. Pinterest shows up because they understand how the Google algorithm works and built their website to display all the signals that Google looks for in relevant image content. They understand user intent and generate URLs that present content in a way that google expects to see. Examples of how they do this from their engineering team: https://medi…
What they are doing to get into google search is not the problem, the problem is all their links are scams, clicking on pinterest google images link lands you on a login screen, or on a farm of similar/adjacent images. Nowhere do they have the content you were actually looking for.
TLDR: they are gaming google
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#24And the Pinterest pages have no content! They've beaten Google or Google doesn't care anymore, either way, plummeting result quality is a strong signal that Google Search is ripe for disruption. Ten years ago, Google would've punished all Pinterest properties for this.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#25One big reason why Pinterest ranks so highly, and why you are seeing different tld's in the results, is because they have a variety of tld's that they use and those tld's all have separate crawl budgets from each other. So Google crawls Pinterest about an order of magnitude more than most other sites. You can read more about this here: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/how-switching-our-d... Source: I run a th…
Does your think tank come up with any ideas on how to keep companies like Pinterest from peeing in the pool so to speak? They made it impossible to find DIY craft stuff that I used to search for, and I can’t imagine it’s the only site doing it.
We are pursuing ideas that we think will increase competition in the search engine market. Our main focus right now is making Google’s index of the web available for use by competitors, since no one other than Google is really allowed to crawl the web. If people were allowed to use the index to build what they want, then you or somebody else would be able to build a search engine that avoids the Pinterest cruft and would be more suited to your needs, instead of Google’s one size fits all approach. So, to answer your question directly, yes we do have some ideas about how to do this.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#26How much of the bafflement stems from the fact that Pinterest's own audience is overwhelmingly women, while the general search audience is 50/50 and the HN audience is, judging by the character of the comments, 99% men?
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#27There's no intentional or manual effort at Google to promote pinterest. Pinterest shows up because they understand how the Google algorithm works and built their website to display all the signals that Google looks for in relevant image content. They understand user intent and generate URLs that present content in a way that google expects to see. Examples of how they do this from their engineering team: https://medi…
Still odd that Google tolerates this. Isn't this exactly the kind of black-hat SEO that they are usually downranking or banning sites for? Pinterest landing pages are intentionally unusable for anyone without an account. It's hard to make a good-faith argument that those pages are the "most relevant result" for someone making a simple image search.
Yep, exactly. I find that Pinterest is slowly making me less and less likely to use Google. Pinterest shows up as the dominating search result even or very specific long tail keywords where one could argue that a collection of images on a login-gated page is not helpful at all.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#28I do not know whether Google gives Pinterest preferential treatment. That said, I'd like to know: What are you searching? Results will be different depending on if you're searching "cute bedroom ideas" or "epistemology in pre-Socratic Greece."
Give it a few days and this page will be the #1 hit for "pre-Socratic bedroom ideas"
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does your think tank come up with any ideas on how to keep companies like Pinterest from peeing in the pool so to speak? They made it impossible to find DIY craft stuff that I used to search for, and I can’t imagine it’s the only site doing it.
We are pursuing ideas that we think will increase competition in the search engine market. Our main focus right now is making Google’s index of the web available for use by competitors, since no one other than Google is really allowed to crawl the web. If people were allowed to use the index to build what they want, then you or somebody else would be able to build a search engine that avoids the Pinterest cruft and w…
> making Google’s index of the web available for use by competitors
What incentive would Google have to continue populating that index?
Would I be breaking the law if I independently crawled and hosted an index without publishing an API for it?
> since no one other than Google is really allowed to crawl the web
Maybe this is the problem that needs solving.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does your think tank come up with any ideas on how to keep companies like Pinterest from peeing in the pool so to speak? They made it impossible to find DIY craft stuff that I used to search for, and I can’t imagine it’s the only site doing it.
We are pursuing ideas that we think will increase competition in the search engine market. Our main focus right now is making Google’s index of the web available for use by competitors, since no one other than Google is really allowed to crawl the web. If people were allowed to use the index to build what they want, then you or somebody else would be able to build a search engine that avoids the Pinterest cruft and w…
> since no one other than Google is really allowed to crawl the web.
??