Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 329 posts

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

#251

Post by thayne »

blunte wrote: post #13
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…

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…

It is basically an arms race between search engines (specifically google) and SEO. Google does change their algorithms, but with enough effort (and money) SEO proffesionals can figure out how to tweak their sites to keep gaming the system. And the casualties of this war are the authentic sites that don't spend a ton of money on SEO.

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

#252

Post by ehnto »

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.

It's a situation where the rules seem obvious but the practical realities of it mean Google has the advantage by being the incumbent. No one would dare block Google for a search traffic reliant business, but some upstart search engine will quickly end up on blacklists even with reasonably slow crawling.

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

#253

Post by chairmanwow1 »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #61
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…

With Google featuring progressively more ads and Google content at the top of the results page, it's not clear if it's still in Google's self interest to give users the best results anymore.

Yeah, it’s honestly time for a new search experience

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

#254

Post by ehnto »

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.

There are syndicated blacklists that get fed into automatic traffic filters. Not to mention a surprising amount of the web is fronted by Cloudflare and other CDNs, making that kind of traffic detection and blocking more effective and widespread than you might expect.

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

#255

Post by rukshn »

I search lot of academic suff like medicine and programing.

Sometimes I search for image results, and my search results are polluted by SlideShare and Slide player

SidePlayer is an ad infested site which also pirate PDFs by crawling for open PDFs and automatically uploading to their website

I don't understand why Google gives priority to such websites.

I believe including pinterest and sites like SlideShare and Slide player in our search results is what google should allow us to opt in not something we should opt out

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

#256

Post by ehnto »

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 for-profit internet is just really such a parallel universe to me.

I know I have been a contrary commentor in this thread, but I hear you with this. What a monster we have built, and what always gets me is how trivial everything is. So much capital is flowing through these ephemeral software systems that, if gone tomorrow, would be ultimately inconsequential to mankind.

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

#257

Post by dwd »

Nice timing on this question - I'm actually deconstructing a website mockup (PDF) this morning and needing to find the originals of the images the graphic designer (who is off on holidays) used. It's not just the dozens of Pinterest copies, but even Medium or private blogs that are using an image and still ranking higher.

I find it disappointing that Google doesn't apply more authority to sites like Unsplash when it is clearing the original source.

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

#258

Post by rhizome »

moultano wrote: post #105
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Google featuring progressively more ads and Google content at the top of the results page, it's not clear if it's still in Google's self interest to give users the best results anymore.

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 doubt the ad organization and ranking teams decide where and how many sponsored listings appear in search results, which I believe is GP's point: the page design/layout and the proportions of ads vs. (more or less) organic listings. Someone decides that searches have e.g. four ads at the top and two at the bottom.

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

#259

Post by newbie789 »

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…

Out of curiosity, what exactly is a "think tank"? Is it the sort of thing a person can make money by founding? What makes it distinct in type from other businesses or organizations?

I've only ever met one person that had anything to do with a think tank at a party about a decade ago, and I never got her contact details so I'm still very much in the dark.

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

#260

Post by knuckleheads »

newbie789 wrote: post #259
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…

Out of curiosity, what exactly is a "think tank"? Is it the sort of thing a person can make money by founding? What makes it distinct in type from other businesses or organizations? I've only ever met one person that had anything to do with a think tank at a party about a decade ago, and I never got her contact details so I'm still very much in the dark.

Good question! A think tank is an organization that researches and sometimes advocates for the government to do certain things. They can be a non profit or an llc (knuckleheads’ club is an llc right now because it was the easiest to set up). In theory, you can make money from founding a think tank, but in practice it’s not a lucrative endeavour unless it becomes big enough that the president start earning steady six figures (like at the major ones in dc).
Post reply on HN