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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?

#231

Post by moultano »

FireBeyond wrote: post #224
texasbigdata wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apropos of anything else, Google is famous for a "monorepo". Any team can see the underlying architecture of things, regardless of any supposed "aggressive firewall" alluded to above.

A monorepo does not let you deduce the revenue consequences of experiments, but regardless, even if you could figure it out, it isn't part of the incentive structure.

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

#232

Post by DarthGhandi »

grishka wrote: post #115
knuckleheads wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applebot was able to get away with doing exactly this but I imagine that's because it's Apple and websites knew that Apple was about to send them enough traffic via Apple News to make it worth their while. I don't know if other search engine operators have tried this but I would imagine they would get caught by rate limiters set for non Google IP's and then they would be blocked.

Still, you keep saying all that as if most websites even notice that they're being crawled, and that their operators are very aware exactly when by whom they're crawled. Like as if the admin gets a notification every time a crawler comes by or something, with precise details about it. I don't think it's nearly as serious as you're trying to make it look.

> Like as if the admin gets a notification every time a crawler comes by or something, with precise details about it.

This is exactly how it works with user-agents and your naivety here is shining bright.

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

#233

Post by stjohnswarts »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #128
blunte wrote: post #13

Earlier 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…

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.

Yeah, the results should definitely contain a HEAVY waiting for accessibility by the general user and most people don't have a pinterest account nor do they want one.

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

#234

Post by knuckleheads »

mslate wrote: post #230
knuckleheads wrote: post #12

One big reason why Pinterest ranks so highly, and why you are seeing different tld's in the results, is because they have a variety of tld's that they use and those tld's all have separate crawl budgets from each other. So Google crawls Pinterest about an order of magnitude more than most other sites. You can read more about this here: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/how-switching-our-d... Source: I run a th…

I don’t think making Google’s index public would be sufficient. Their real core asset is not the index but the historical engagement data they have of searchers’ interactions with the index (both on the results page and offsite analytics Google has access to, eg Google Analytics/display ad network). Making that historical engagement data public is not feasible/realistic, IMO.

I think it is necessary though. Other search engine operators have cited this as one of the reasons their search engines fail or struggle to provide as good results. As far as the engagement data goes, it’s something that the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK has looked at as part of their investigation into google. See here for a very interesting analysis of Google’s and Bings click and query data: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5efb1db6e90e0...

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

#235

Post by aendruk »

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

Yep. Google removed it.

https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/issues/674

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

#236

Post by CapricornNoble »

the__alchemist wrote: post #79

Could you please post some examples of search queries (text or image) that are dominated by Pinterest? I share the sentiment in other comments that search engines are (deliberately?) allowing SEO abusers to degrade the user's experience. I noticed that for some queries (Like "How to brush teeth"), there are more ads on the first page than results! They're marked, but not in an immediately-visible way; I'd be most peo…

>>>Could you please post some examples of search queries (text or image) that are dominated by Pinterest?

These are all image searches "sci-fi combat exoskeleton" -> 7 of 24 top images are Pinterest "zen minimalist clothing" -> 8 of 24 "grav tank concept art" -> 9 of 19

Like many other users in this topic, I run most of my G-Image searches with "-pinterest". I use DDG as my primary non-technical search engine, typically only switching to Google for images, trying to solve error messages, or researching frameworks/APIs/etc.

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

#237

Post by knuckleheads »

grishka wrote: post #225
rewq4321 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add another data point for you: I have had one of my websites brought down by Yandex bots before. There are also dozens of no-name bots (often SEO tools like ahrefs, semrush, etc.) that can sometimes cause troubles. For me it was a problem of having lots of pages, and having a high cost per request (due to the type of website it was). For other websites, it is not necessarily about the volume of traffic from bots,…

> the risk of web scrapers getting their proprietary data That's some weird logic, to me at least. That data is literally given away to everyone but some people or organizations can't have it? If you want to control access to it, maybe at least require people to register before they can see it? Is it even proprietary if it's public with no access control whatsoever? This for-profit internet is just really such a para…

This is a question the courts are working through with LinkedIn and HiQ https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l... as well as the Van Buren case https://themarkup.org/news/2020/12/03/why-web-scraping-is-vi...

It’s a different world where there are no laws or prices or contracts really.

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

#238

Post by konjin »

Winterflow3r wrote: post #27
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.

Yep, exactly. I find that Pinterest is slowly making me less and less likely to use Google. Pinterest shows up as the dominating search result even or very specific long tail keywords where one could argue that a collection of images on a login-gated page is not helpful at all.

I don't use google for images anymore because of this.

Bing is terrible, but it's better than google.

Which means that google is worse than terrible.

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

#239

Post by rcpt »

not2b wrote: post #204
alisonkisk wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think the search team runs an experiment once per 3 months to test how their algorithm ideas impact earnings?

The company isn't a charity. If a search change demonstrably has a negative effect on company earnings (even if users like it) it will almost certainly be reversed. I don't think they run an experiment once every three months, I think they are testing continuously, including A/B testing (some users get the change, others don't,).

You can find public examples where the opposite has been done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda

> In 2016, Matt Cutts, Google's head of webspam at the time of the Panda update, commented that "with Panda, Google took a big enough revenue hit via some partners that Google actually needed to disclose Panda as a material impact on an earnings call. But I believe it was the right decision to launch Panda, both for the long-term trust of our users and for a better ecosystem for publishers."

Disclosure I work at Google.

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

#240

Post by the__alchemist »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #236
the__alchemist wrote: post #79

Could you please post some examples of search queries (text or image) that are dominated by Pinterest? I share the sentiment in other comments that search engines are (deliberately?) allowing SEO abusers to degrade the user's experience. I noticed that for some queries (Like "How to brush teeth"), there are more ads on the first page than results! They're marked, but not in an immediately-visible way; I'd be most peo…

>>>Could you please post some examples of search queries (text or image) that are dominated by Pinterest? These are all image searches "sci-fi combat exoskeleton" -> 7 of 24 top images are Pinterest "zen minimalist clothing" -> 8 of 24 "grav tank concept art" -> 9 of 19 Like many other users in this topic, I run most of my G-Image searches with "-pinterest". I use DDG as my primary non-technical search engine, typica…

Thanks! Can rep
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