I often check my images to see how well there are appearing in the google search. Many times I have found to my delight one of my images clicked on it only to find it leads to another picture on Pinterest and is a completely different product and no link to me or my artwork or product. It is very upsetting that original source takes second place to third parties and these pins are vanishing and being replaced. I have no idea how they are doing this but it is making using Pinterest to show my original art and work a place to consider complete withdrawing from.
Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
311–320 of 329 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#312i specifically hate how they hack slap a login wall on images, and dont allow you to right-click+save on mobile. they're intent on breaking the mobile web for their own self interest. if you're going to SEO yourself to the top of google, good for you, but please dont use google as non-optional lead capture for your app that I don't want.
update: i wrote a personal google proxy to tweak google results how i want them. managed to get it recognized as a search engine (on my android chrome) via opensearch. not sharing the code for obvious reasons https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1342625544320339969
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#313Earlier 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…
> That data is literally given away to everyone but some people or organizations can't have it?
It's often a question of quantity. LinkedIn probably doesn't care about you scraping a few profiles, but if you're harvesting every bit of their publicly-available data, then they get a little scared that you're building something that's going to compete with them.
Same with Instagram, or Facebook, for example. Though in this case it's probably more of a user-privacy issue - at least that's what they say.
It's not really weird logic to me - seems to make sense.
> If you want to control access to it, maybe at least require people to register
Most of the time they can't do this because they need the Google traffic. LinkedIn wants a result in the SERP for Bob Smith when you search for "Bob Smith" because that helps them get signups. Google won't list the page if that content is gated by a sign-in/register page.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> making Google’s index of the web available for use by competitors That does seem like a good idea since it amounts essentially to a database of stuff that Google does not own (by construction) and is of public utility.
Exactly. Everybody always talks about turning tech companies into public utilities without really explaining what the utility would be. A public index of the web would be an amazing utility for many of the reasons in this thread and would spur on a ton of new innovation and businesses. If you would like to read more about all this, please checkout https://knuckleheads.club
What kind of research is it? Is it just funding you or members can participate? I do Bayesian and non Bayesian data analysis and modeling, would be potentially fun to poke at the data
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Everybody always talks about turning tech companies into public utilities without really explaining what the utility would be. A public index of the web would be an amazing utility for many of the reasons in this thread and would spur on a ton of new innovation and businesses. If you would like to read more about all this, please checkout https://knuckleheads.club
What kind of research is it? Is it just funding you or members can participate? I do Bayesian and non Bayesian data analysis and modeling, would be potentially fun to poke at the data
Right now the research is two parts, analyzing websites robots.txt files for bias and then talking with search engine operators and website operators to get their stories that validate these ideas. Right now I am the main person working on this research but I would like to get the robots.txt parsing and analysis code open sourced soon to allow people to start digging in. Getting people access to the data is trickier, but it feels doable as well. You'd be welcome to join in!
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what I am trying to espouse is two things. The first is that there might be a large group of users unknown to you and I who enjoy looking at pinterest in the image results and that is who Google wants to cater to. And the second is not that Google is or should be a "pure democracy of algorithmic conformance" but that Google has, does and always will make choices about what is best and that the definition of b…
The first is that there might be a large group of users unknown to you and I who enjoy looking at pinterest in the image results and that is who Google wants to cater to. The discussion is about Pininterest in text searches. My only objection to Pinterest in image searches is that it's paywalled/login-walled. But larger issue is I'd acknowledge some search results just aren't what I in particular want but I'd claim o…
Many people have been upvoting my comments here so the evidence I am seeing suggests that I haven't lost too many friends here with this line of thinking.
Continuing out the logic of your suggestion here, you would seem to imply that every other currently existing search engine besides Google also has bad quality as well in this regard. I say this because if other search engines had better quality that Google, they would be doing better than Google as per your suggestion. But, obviously Google is on top in a big way, so I have to ask, do you think the entire search engine industry, not just Google, has poor quality search results? What do you know that they don't?
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#317There'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…
Instead of playing cat and mouse with Pinterest, what would be a much better idea is to let users themselves decide what's important to them. Let us vote search results up or down, and let us block sites we don't like yet keep showing up. Those two changes would do a lot to improve user experience.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yandex is great for images these days.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#319Related: in the last several years, there started appearing these StackOverflow mirrors. It's gotten to the point that you can't google a programming question without running into at least one. Some copy the questions and answers verbatim, some use machine translation to (crappily) translate them into my native language. Sometimes they even rank higher than the real StackOverflow. I really wish there was a non-hacky…
Add this to your browser's search engines:
Stack Overflow
so
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s (site:stackoverflow.com OR site:superuser.com OR site:stackexchange.com)
Re: Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first is that there might be a large group of users unknown to you and I who enjoy looking at pinterest in the image results and that is who Google wants to cater to. The discussion is about Pininterest in text searches. My only objection to Pinterest in image searches is that it's paywalled/login-walled. But larger issue is I'd acknowledge some search results just aren't what I in particular want but I'd claim o…
Many people have been upvoting my comments here so the evidence I am seeing suggests that I haven't lost too many friends here with this line of thinking. Continuing out the logic of your suggestion here, you would seem to imply that every other currently existing search engine besides Google also has bad quality as well in this regard. I say this because if other search engines had better quality that Google, they w…
Knucklehead: But, obviously Google is on top in a big way, so I have to ask, do you think the entire search engine industry, not just Google, has poor quality search results? What do you know that they don't?
Me earlier: larger issue is I'd acknowledge some search results just aren't what I in particular want but I'd claim other results are actually objectively low quality
It seems like you just a kind of "shtick". Anyone talking about quality, no how much nuance they add to it, gets thrown the same "how do you your ideas of quality are right". I already mentioned that quality is piece of Google formula and Google spend real money attaining that, employs thousands of people to rate search quality. Of course I'm not claiming to be a personal expert on quality. You can read further what I actual wrote above.