My girlfriend and I watched Interstellar the other night. She had a few questions at the end and I remembered there being some great infographics that would help explain. So I reached for Google Image Search and the results were dominated by Pinterest. It wouldn't have been so bad if I could've viewed the original full-size image - but for that I would've needed to create a Pinterest account which I absolutely didn't want to do. After that I gave up and drew my own with pen and paper.
Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
191–200 of 329 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#192Earlier 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
There use to be an easy way to configure your account to always block certain domains, but that's gone now, so you have to use -site per-query. Maybe there are browser plugins that help? I miss the old functionality. I only had to block about a dozen sites to get great search results. Maybe it'd be less viable now; I'd probably have to block hundreds or thousands of sites, and they'd keep breeding new ones.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
There’s no way that’s true. I’d be surprised if even 1% of the Google users paid attention to the source site underneath the image.
And you’d think people with a Pinterest account would opt to search on their website/app rather than going through Google (thus making it even more unlikely that the Google user has a Pinterest account).
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just avoid using google. The Pinterest results in google image search queries was a major driver to me using bing/ duck duck go.
Linking directly to the image file (and in fact a cached version of the full image) is one of the best reasons to use DDG. Reverse image search is also intentionally gimped, unlike non-US jurisdiction Yandex which is quite good. It's certainly for legal reasons, not technical, but Image Search has gotten progressively worse every year. It used to be godly effective 10 years ago.
> Linking directly to the image file (and in fact a cached version of the full image) is one of the best reasons to use DDG.
That’s possible thanks to Microsoft’s Bing API. I’m surprised Getty (who’s afaik responsible for Google removing direct image links) only went after Google and not Microsoft.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why there's an aggressive firewall between the ads and search organizations. The ranking team isn't even aware of revenue numbers by ACL.
I'm sure the search team can, erm,google for the ad revenue figures in the earnings release. After reading the anti trust filing it’s hard to argue Google is anything else but evil and a lot of what it does is to hide its monopoly.
You think the search team runs an experiment once per 3 months to test how their algorithm ideas impact earnings?
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's indeed a useful tip - and no offense to the GP - but this kind of reply always feels like the tech support equivalent of a mandatory arbitration clause: like an attempt to solve an issue individually with each person reporting it instead of giving a systemic solution that would benefit anyone. The blame is shifted from devs providing a good service to individual users not knowing the latest workaround.
Most probably the devs know how to do it but specs written by someone else told them to obfuscate useful functionality.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If that's the idea, isn't it easier to just show random junk? Why pinterest?
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people who click on Pinterest links are already logged into Pinterest...
There’s no way that’s true. I’d be surprised if even 1% of the Google users paid attention to the source site underneath the image. And you’d think people with a Pinterest account would opt to search on their website/app rather than going through Google (thus making it even more unlikely that the Google user has a Pinterest account).
Pinterest has a huge user base. They don't need to look at the source if they have an account; the link will work fine.
And, no, most people don't bother picking a site before searching. Why would they artificially limit their results? People don't even visit amazon before searching for Amazon products.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#199There'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…
They are playing a cat and mouse game, only the mouse is quite determined as its bonuses depend on evading, and the cat is very fat and comfortable :).
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Just add `-site:example.org` to your query.
I have done this throughout COVID for the NYTimes' content, as it's behind a paywall.