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

1. When people see a search result from Pinterest, they tend to click on it more than on the results from competing publishers.

2. After they click on it, they tend to engage with the content more than they do with the content from other publishers.

This is not specific to Pinterest, it's how modern SEO works. You'll notice that Pinterest doesn't dominate every search result in the world, but predominantly the ones where the user's search intent is more aligned with Pinterest's strengths (product discovery, visual stimulation, pet/animal pictures, art direction, etc.).

I think what people find confusing is how can Pinterest compete with other search results that have far more text? Well, it's not about the amount of text at all, it's about satisfying the search intent. And when someone types in: "what should I wear for my wedding," images are better in answering that question than text (a picture is worth...). As Pinterest's success in SEO teaches us, there are many more similar instances than we would have expected.

I also think there's a disconnect between how new algorithms are evaluated and real world results. Reverse image search is total trash now. Mostly returns annotations "red, dress, girl" instead of the pages where I can find the image.

Unless it's a brand name product, then it's exact matches.

So you're getting less than excellence in engineering, plus influence from shopping and ad dollar focused PMs and not much care is actually given to the search experience.

And it shows

But there is an effort at Pinterest to promote itself via Google. Pinterest pays Google for online ad aservices. Pinterest is a Google customer. The user is not.

The bottom line at Google is not driven by showing users the "best" results for users. The bottom line is driven by customers such as Pinterest who pay Google to assist them with online advertising.

Page and Brin identified this conflict of interest in their 1998 paper introducing Google, which was originally intended to be an academic endeavor, not to become an online ad services company.^1 According to the authors, (a) the interests of users and advertisers are not one in the same, (b) there are inherent effects on search results if the search engine is funded by advertising, and (c) the behind-the-scenes operation ("technical details") of search engines funded by advertising become largely non-transparent to users/competitors (a "black art").

I reckon (c) is why we get questions like this one from the OP.

I have also seen these inexplicable and useless Pinterest links in Google searches.

1. https://research.google/pubs/pub334.pdf

Quotes:

"To make matters worse, some advertisers attempt to gain people's attention by taking measures meant to mislead automated search engines."

"Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm."

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."

"For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

"Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results."

"But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."