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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?

#171

Post by oh_sigh »

grishka wrote: post #92
knuckleheads wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two main reasons why I say nobody besides Google is really allowed to crawl the web. The first is that Google gets much more access to pages on websites than everybody else. You can see this by examining the robots.txt files of various websites[0]. I've been doing this for several years now and Google has a consistent advantage across many thousands websites that I've looked at. This adds up to a significan…

So, uh, don't respect robots.txt in your search engine? It's not like there's a law that you have to, and that you can't pretend you are Googlebot. The only real obstacle I can imagine is that some firewalls might be configured to be more permissive with traffic originating from Google subnets.

Google tells website operators how to verify google bots in a way that can't be spoofed.

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

#172

Post by tobyjsullivan »

Chirael wrote: post #155
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn’t there an option at one time to tell Google to hide results from a certain domain? I feel like I haven’t seen that in years though

You can hide sites with a flag in the query. No idea if it works on image search but I assume it does.

    -site:pinterest.com

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

#173

Post by knuckleheads »

joe_the_user wrote: post #165
knuckleheads wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who determines what is the best ranking? Who was defining what was "good"? There isn't some abstract, mathematically verifiable best ranking, a platonic ideal that all search engines should aspire to. Google has always made choices about how to rank that trade off the interests of various groups of users, from the very beginning. The complaints that you and I have about pinterest being ranked so highly come because G…

There isn't some abstract, mathematically verifiable best ranking, a platonic ideal that all search engines should aspire to. Of course, "quality" applied is a broad term indeed. But there no being a single certain measure of quality doesn't mean there aren't some things that most people would call crap. Google employs a large number of search quality raters and these folks can likely distinguish the terrible from th…

I think what I am trying to espouse is two things. The first is that there might be a large group of users unknown to you and I who enjoy looking at pinterest in the image results and that is who Google wants to cater to. And the second is not that Google is or should be a "pure democracy of algorithmic conformance" but that Google has, does and always will make choices about what is best and that the definition of best is up to their discretion. They are making choices about who to cater to with their results and justify those choices with their own logic that we will likely never know. One company having the power to be the only one making all those choices isn't anything I would call a democracy.

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

#174

Post by knuckleheads »

frakkingcylons wrote: post #164
knuckleheads wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Our main focus right now is making Google’s index of the web available for use by competitors How would that work? I'm pretty curious about this if there's anything out there to read. EDIT: Ah I saw the link to Knuckleheads' Club :P

:) No worries. If you'd like to chat about it more, shoot me an email at zack@knuckleheads.club, I'm obviously very passionate about the subject and love talking about it. There's still a lot more to write and publish, I won't be done with this hobby horse of mine for a while yet.

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

#175

Post by 1f60c »

amelius wrote: post #45
derenge wrote: post #2

“Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack” https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-...

Ugh, this is bad. Makes you wonder, why they let this happen. Do people at Google own Pinterest stocks?

> Do people at Google own Pinterest stocks?

TIL Pinterest is a publicly traded company (NYSE:PINS).

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

#176

Post by liveoneggs »

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…

pinterest is clearly being spared seo penalty so one can only assume pro-pinterest bias at google

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

#177

Post by jedberg »

xg15 wrote: post #143
jedberg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your premise is wrong. The service isn't broken. I'd assume Google has enough people and data to know that it's doing what most people want. They were even kind enough to put in a workaround for the minority for whom it doesn't work well (which appears to be OP).

Most people want to have a full result page of nothing but login walls when searching for any kind of image?

Most people who click on Pinterest links are already logged into Pinterest...

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

#179

Post by mianos »

alkonaut wrote: post #132

If Google decided tomorrow that Quora and Pinterest is spam and should basically never be in the top 10 results pages, couldn’t they just fix it? What’s the worst that could happen?

They would be sued. Pinterest and Quora don't actually care that their actions make the web crappy for us all. They would stand on their high horses and complain that google is treating them unfairly. Normally I would assume this problem is because all the cool kids at google are working on more interesting problems but in this case I honestly believe they can't make a change for the betterment of the majority of their users.

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

#180

Post by Udik »

Chirael wrote: post #155
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn’t there an option at one time to tell Google to hide results from a certain domain? I feel like I haven’t seen that in years though

I don't get why Google doesn't give an option to permanently remove or downgrade certain domains, straight from the results page. There are results I am never interested in. It could also work as a further signal for their ranking, if used with some caution.
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