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

271–280 of 329 posts

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

#271

Post by visarga »

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…

I think Google collects clickthorughs on the search result page and thus knows how people react to its responses. It also knows when the user is quickly returning to search after checking out a link. Pinterest is probably appreciated by people, probably of a different demographic than you.

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

#272

Post by visarga »

Udik wrote: post #180
Chirael wrote: post #155

Earlier 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

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.

Probably Google would do good to give up total control and obscurity and put people in the driving seat of search customization. Maybe that would even save them from the anti-trust push (one indexing and retrieval back end + multiple ranking, filtering and UI front ends).

But I'm wondering if this would not be better implemented at browser level. Can we have the white/black list run locally in the browser, re-ranking results on web pages and hiding what we don't want to see? Not just on Google, but also on the rest of the web, like ad blocking extensions.

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

#273

Post by cft »

visarga wrote: post #271
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…

I think Google collects clickthorughs on the search result page and thus knows how people react to its responses. It also knows when the user is quickly returning to search after checking out a link. Pinterest is probably appreciated by people, probably of a different demographic than you.

Here is some background on this:

Recently, it has been revealed that Pinterest reverse-image searches Google for uploaded images and adds the Google query result to the Pinterest image page for SEO: https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-...

This degrades quality of Google image search, for example this Reddit post on removing Pinterest got 77k upvotes:

Reddit r/LifeProTips to remove Pinterest from Google searches: https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/hejbl0/lpt_whe...

Earlier Reddit petition to Google to remove Pinterest from search results (66k upvotes): https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/85atho/pinterest_ne...

Hacker News discussion of Pinterest's Google scraping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701998

Earlier discussion on HackerNews (1.1k upvotes): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996

"Unpinterested" Chrome extension to combat Pinterest spam (10k+ downloads): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...

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

#274

Post by rdlecler1 »

notacoward wrote: post #250
rdlecler1 wrote: post #8

Another example about how google is broken. It has great difficulty distinguishing noise from signal.

Is it really difficulty, or indifference? I think they could do better, but as a near-monopoly in that space they'd rather spend the money elsewhere.

Sounds like something Yahoo might have said when they declined to by Google. Maybe it’s a good time to start a search engine.

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

#276

Post by grishka »

jjeaff wrote: post #265
ratww wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're pretty old. I remember when Google added an option to block domains (the option you want) around 2011 and they were the first thing I removed from my results, along with Wikipedia mirrors. After the option to block domains was removed around 2014-2015, I rarely came across those anymore, but it seems they're back...

There are extensions to permanently block sites from results. Like: personal blocklist https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

I know these exist and I could as well write uBO rules to hide unwanted search results, that's why I said non-hacky ;)

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

#277

Post by visarga »

cft wrote: post #273
visarga wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google collects clickthorughs on the search result page and thus knows how people react to its responses. It also knows when the user is quickly returning to search after checking out a link. Pinterest is probably appreciated by people, probably of a different demographic than you.

Here is some background on this: Recently, it has been revealed that Pinterest reverse-image searches Google for uploaded images and adds the Google query result to the Pinterest image page for SEO: https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-... This degrades quality of Google image search, for example this Reddit post on removing Pinterest got 77k upvotes: Reddit r/LifeProTips to remove Pinterest fr…

I agree, but if you take uninformed users (or users at random, that don't subscribe to a Google related forum) they would be happy with the Pinterest results because the results look nice at first sight and they don't have time to learn about the problem. Google using this signal would conclude that Pinterest is OK for the users.

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

#278

Post by whatshisface »

dylan604 wrote: post #263
leereeves wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-pinterest removes pages that contain the term pinterest, so pages from a pinterest.* domain, plus articles about pinterest, etc.

Sounds pretty good to me. If I'm searching for a term, but don't want results from pintrest, then I'm probably not wanting to read an article about pintrest either.

"Here's a picture I took today. I also posted it on Instagram and Pintrest."

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

#279

Post by jbay808 »

dylan604 wrote: post #263
leereeves wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-pinterest removes pages that contain the term pinterest, so pages from a pinterest.* domain, plus articles about pinterest, etc.

Sounds pretty good to me. If I'm searching for a term, but don't want results from pintrest, then I'm probably not wanting to read an article about pintrest either.

If you wanted to read an article about Pinterest, it would probably be hard to search for it in any other way.

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

#280

Post by VBprogrammer »

moultano wrote: post #205
not2b wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,).

> If a search change demonstrably has a negative effect on company earnings (even if users like it) it will almost certainly be reversed. This is completely false. I've personally been involved in launching ranking changes that negatively impacted revenue substantially. I didn't find out until months later through the grapevine, and only in vague terms like "ads had to scramble." Versions of them remain in production…

Perhaps this has gone too far, as others have noted, there are so many ads and Google generated content (esp. YouTube links) that the organic search results are practically on the second page.

If Googlers were allowed to consider revenue in the search results perhaps they wouldn't have been so easily down graded to a second class citizen.

Post reply on HN