151–160 of 329 posts
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…
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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…
>Google should be asking from a product perspective if they are providing the search results the user is most likely seeking. I am cynical. Maybe Google's own experiments show that users click more ads when they get frustrated of the Pinterest spam that is technically not spam enough to be removed from the index. What the users are going to do? Use Bing? Google's most optimised version is probably being an Ads search…
duckduckgo isn't horrific. And certainly not for image searches, which is how Pinterest's pollution ends up being noticed.
if you're going to SEO yourself to the top of google, good for you, but please dont use google as non-optional lead capture for your app that I don't want.
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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)
I wish I had looked into this before! :-)
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Yeah, Pinterest is almost always disappointing as a result: their account requirements are annoying and it tends to obfuscate the source of the image or information you’re looking for.
A few times I've landed on Pinterest and they lock user copied (contrary to copyright law in my country AFAICT) content behind a registration-wall. They never show enough utility for new to register, they just tease on Google and then don't show what they teased. Google results would be better for me with all Pinterest results removed.
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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.
This used to be true. Regularly I had to use the !g bang to find what I was looking for. Lately, I've realised that I hardly use it anymore and I do results are far worse on Google. Your mileage may vary of course but I don't bother with Google anymore.
Not to mention the awful vendor blogs and stores and secretive marketing clickbait masquerading as a neutral information totally dominating Google's page 1 and 2 of results.
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Services and users have different goals. Why is the helpful technologist the problem?
Real answer? Because helpful technologists are the interface between less knowledgeable users and services like Google. We’re the power users and “mavens” who are both highly exposed to the product and have some understanding of what’s going wrong and how it might be made better. We also spend a lot more time talking to that product’s engineering staff than the typical user (see e.g. the fact that we’re here on HN.)…
How, really, could you improve the Google service for everyone?
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Just do -pinterest in your search to filter
I just wanted to mention that excluding strings has been broken for me off-and-on over the last month at least. Not directly relevant to anything except how lame google has become.
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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)
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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…
Yeah, Pinterest is almost always disappointing as a result: their account requirements are annoying and it tends to obfuscate the source of the image or information you’re looking for.
Recently they removed the facility to, when saving a pin, to type the name of the board to find it, now having to scroll through an alphabetical listing.
Before that, they also redesigned the website such that a refresh of the page was required in order to save a pin to two different boards, an action they explicitly support.
The website is also a slow resource hog.
Of course, it comes with the tried and tested “corporate morality” where there are rules against various things that are phrased in terms of moral concerns that are really about keeping their app on the Apple store — this naturally includes vague standards on “nudity” that are not worded in a gendered way, but there is an unofficial code that everyone knows that it very much is.
The most annoying moral preaching I encountered was that I searched for “boy's love” once — the genre of male–male tragic romantic fiction, that got me a preachy message about pædophilia that made me suspect my i.p. address was probably passed on to some U.S.A. authorities. It's really quite a big genre and has nothing to do with pædophilia.
They only recently added a way to search one's own's pins, and it's very lacking and doesn't reliably even catch words in the descriptions thereof. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn't.
What can be said about it is that the algorithm for finding related things is generally quite good — the interesting thing is that it's actually better at finding the aforementioned boy's love fiction than most of the websites that actually host it.
The problem is that there is no real competitor.