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Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

#71

Post by kenniskrag »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #60
kauju wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do -pinterest in your search to filter

User: This service has a problem and it's not working well. Programmer: There's nothing wrong with the service, you just have to use [magic incantation] to make it work right. I've been hoping for 20 years that this kind of exchange would stop happening. Still hoping! :-)

"Programmer" here is wrong. Because we are all user of the product "google search".

But yes I see your point. I call it the "permanent workaround"

Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

#72

Post by ClumsyPilot »

blunte wrote: post #36
rdlecler1 wrote: post #8

Another example about how google is broken. It has great difficulty distinguishing noise from signal.

It's also another example of how modern tech companies are broken (or lacking ethics). Currently, many big tech companies do basically whatever they want. Facebook and other ad companies have been caught knowingly defrauding ad spend customers, Amazon has been knowingly permitting counterfeit sales for years, Uber has been ignoring regional laws globally, Airbnb was (and may still be) ignoring or hiding data that ill…

The economy is meant to be built so that anything harmful to the rest of society is either unprofitable, or criminal (i.e. theft).

Obviously we have a new frontier of digital stuff, but the law and economic incentives are still ignorant of it.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

#73

Post by ufmace »

blunte wrote: post #18
ffpip wrote: post #9

google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest."]) google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1) Add to uBlock Origin. in the "My Filters" tab. This will completely block pinterest

Unfortunately this did not work for me. I added these two, and then I did a search on images.google.com for "custom carved door frame". 5 of 7 images on the first row of results was some pinterest site.

Weird, I don't do anything at all to block pinterest, and I just did that same search on Google Image search, and pinterest results are 6 out of 20 on the first 3 rows, and 1 per row at most for all of the rows below that.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

#74

Post by jariel »

blunte wrote: post #13
hayksaakian wrote: post #3

There'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…

Google should be asking from a product perspective if they are providing the search results the user is most likely seeking. I seriously doubt that most pinterest results are what users are seeking. As such, Google probably should consider changes to their algorithm to compensate (cat and mouse) for pinterest's gaming. That is assuming how pinterest does it is not against any google rules... because if it were agains…

This is a little bit like: 'McDonald's should serve healthier food, like Salads'.

'What Google Wants' and 'What We Want' have reached a crude equilibrium and it's unlikely to change that much, even if there are obvious improvements to make.

Qualitative improvements beyond need generally require a very specific corporate and cultural focus. If Sergei or Larry 'came back' and mandated it, the system would move around it. Or Sundar could, maybe, pull that off, but it's not in his DNA really.

The lack of material innovation in search stopped over a decade ago.

Otherwise, we should be getting betas every few months, with all sorts of options, features, etc. Even simple things like 'forever blocking a site by default' would be great.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

#76

Post by DangitBobby »

mulmen wrote: post #32
kauju wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do -pinterest in your search to filter

Google account preferences used to have an option to exclude domains from results. About a decade (?) ago I added Burleson Consulting and expertsexchange to blocked domains and Google was instantly useful again. In 2014-ish Google moved this functionality to Chrome so I lost access to it. Not sure if it is still there.

It's not perfect, but I use the Firefox version of this extension. Good for blocking Pinterest and those techno-babble scraper sites.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

#77

Post by IanCal »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #60
kauju wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do -pinterest in your search to filter

User: This service has a problem and it's not working well. Programmer: There's nothing wrong with the service, you just have to use [magic incantation] to make it work right. I've been hoping for 20 years that this kind of exchange would stop happening. Still hoping! :-)

And there's always this kind of response. They didn't say the service was fine, they just provided a simple workaround which doesn't require forcing a change to Google's algorithm. Hoping they don't help with this seems odd.

So, to counter, I'm glad that they did say this as it regularly annoys me too.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

#79

Post by the__alchemist »

Could you please post some examples of search queries (text or image) that are dominated by Pinterest?

I share the sentiment in other comments that search engines are (deliberately?) allowing SEO abusers to degrade the user's experience. I noticed that for some queries (Like "How to brush teeth"), there are more ads on the first page than results! They're marked, but not in an immediately-visible way; I'd be most people integrate them with search results mentally.

I started throwing together a search engine about a week ago to address these concerns, and put it online yesterday. (https://www.pageref.org). I'm deliberately penalizing SEO abusers, and promoting websites that have high-quality content. Running custom searches on these sites in some cases based on keyword.

In a lot of cases, I'm throwing in search queries, and going through each result one at a time, and categorizing them; eg penalizing sites that use clickbait or scammy ads, that are low-quality but show up high in results etc, or probably aren't relevant, but are highly SEO optimized, like Pinterest.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

#80

Post by jonas21 »

Winterflow3r wrote: post #10
jldugger wrote: post #4

Are we using different googles?

We might be doing very different queries :) If you search for makeup related content, Pinterest comes up a lot because people tend to pin and curate makeup related stuff there

If lots of people have spent time curating the Pinterest content, and searchers are likely to be looking for curated content, doesn't it make sense that Pinterest would rank highly in the search results?
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