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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?

#81

Post by ganstyles »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #55
xg15 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Isn't this exactly the kind of black-hat SEO that they are usually downranking or banning sites for? How is it blackhat to do exactly what Google wants?

Using tricks at the detriment of the user to the benefit of the service is blackhat. Pinterest is doing these tricks to their benefit at the extreme detriment to everyone but themselves.

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

#82

Post by ratww »

_AzMoo wrote: post #54
maya24 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using Google search. DDG works just as well

I use DDG search most of the time, but I find this to be untrue. DDG is pretty good, but struggles with context a lot more than Google does. For example, when searching for an error in a programming library, DDG is likely to return the library homepage, whereas google is more likely to return the specific github issue where the error is being discussed.

For text it depends [1] but for images I find DDG to range from slightly to significantly better than Google. Also, I have direct access to the image file URL without having to rely on browser extensions.

[1] I wonder if the meme "DDG is not that good" is so prevalent on Hacker News because it sucks for programming stuff.

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

#83

Post by boraoztunc »

ffpip wrote: post #38
blunte wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you try this? google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest."]) google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1)

Thank you that works, eliminated Pinterest results.

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

#84

Post by grishka »

Related: in the last several years, there started appearing these StackOverflow mirrors. It's gotten to the point that you can't google a programming question without running into at least one. Some copy the questions and answers verbatim, some use machine translation to (crappily) translate them into my native language. Sometimes they even rank higher than the real StackOverflow.

I really wish there was a non-hacky way to ban sites from Google search results. I also feel like Google's ranking algorithm is utterly broken since it's amenable to this kind of exploitation.

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

#85

Post by somerandom895 »

Pinterest search results are so frustrating. There's a page that's close to what I want - but I can't get to the text ... I don't want a picture, I want to read a document. Seems like something is off, cuz it's crowding out sites with real content.

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

#87

Post by tshaddox »

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! :-)

But no one said that there’s nothing wrong with the service. They merely offered a very simple workaround. I can’t imagine why you’d hope for that to stop happening.

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

#88

Post by zelly »

It should violate the duplicate content guideline, since 100% of Pinterest content is not original and lifted from another website.

Then again G also ranks those Markov-generated "blogs" with nonsensical text, not sure what to call them but you've seen them. It seems SEO is still alive and well despite all the claims of its death.

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

#89

Post by lopmotr »

knuckleheads wrote: post #34
burnthrow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> What incentive would Google have to continue populating that index? Presumably they would still want to run google.com and make money off of it. > Would I be breaking the law if I independently crawled and hosted an index without publishing an API for it? No. You would not get the advantage that Google gets when it crawls the web and so would not have access to a large amount of data that nobody else has access to.…

Do any site operators actually block non-Google search engine crawlers because being listed DDG/Bing/etc isn't worth the extra cost of serving the crawler? It sound a bit ridiculous unless they actually don't want to be found. Maybe they only allow GoogleBot because that's all they thought of and the extra cost is in researching what all the other search engines call theirs.

Perhaps other search engines should spoof GoogleBot. Browsers have being doing that since forever spoofing Netscape (Mozilla), Safari, etc. for the same reason.

> Why don't we have Google share the results and we can use that money to do more productive things than recreating that work?

This sounds like a common fallacy of people criticizing the free market. Duplicated effort looks wasteful but turns out to be far more productive than the lack of incentive that comes with not being able to profit from your work/investment.

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

#90

Post by creato »

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…

I think they can't do anything about it. Regulators and lawmakers in the US and EU would be very receptive to complaints from pinterest if google were to act somehow.
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