101–110 of 119 posts
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"Growth hack" sounds so benign when this is really tantamount to spam
"Growth hack" is an industry euphemism for "unethical practice." You can tell it doesn't literally mean "growth hack" because it's being applied here to the website that Alexa currently ranks #152 worldwide and the typical excuses about how you need to get a little dirty when you're a tiny business just getting started don't remotely hold water.
Back when I was an SRE at google for their web crawler, I thought they should de-index pinterest (did not get any traction with this). I still think they should de-index pinterest. I add "-site:pinterest.*" to all my image searches.
There's an extension for that :) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...
Long time Pinterest user here with a different perspective; back around 2016 there was a serious problem with duplicate images on Pinterest. You couldn't search for the word "bicycle" without seeing the same photo hundreds of times. At some point it got better, and it seemed to me that they were doing some image recognition. It has since gotten MUCH better at suggesting images that are visually similar. So let me get…
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's the opposite of what we're hoping for here. I understand that it's frustrating to be in the minority and represent a contrarian view to an internet forum, but if you don't want to discredit the truth you're arguing for, the only way is to provide correct information and correct errors neutrally. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Long time Pinterest user here with a different perspective; back around 2016 there was a serious problem with duplicate images on Pinterest. You couldn't search for the word "bicycle" without seeing the same photo hundreds of times. At some point it got better, and it seemed to me that they were doing some image recognition. It has since gotten MUCH better at suggesting images that are visually similar. So let me get…
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's the opposite of what we're hoping for here. I understand that it's frustrating to be in the minority and represent a contrarian view to an internet forum, but if you don't want to discredit the truth you're arguing for, the only way is to provide correct information and correct errors neutrally. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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This answer is super spot on, and this will be the story of our lives for a while.
It could be better than what we have now, assuming somewhat smart AI. Right now, data gives plausible deniability, and is the universal scapegoat - you get to do whatever you want, backing this up with misapplied A/B tests and telemetry, with zero statistical rigor. And if someone complains about your decisions, you point to these tests and that telemetry, and cry "we're a data driven company, and the data proves we'…
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I wish we could do the same for Shutterstock and all these useless stock image websites that have totally hacked Google image search yet Google won't do anything about them for some reason.
Huh? I don't see anything wrong with that. If you search for an image and Google shows you that photo on a stock imagery site, I'd count that as a win -- they've correctly pointed you to the source of the image, rather than a downstream licensee of the image.
Also the results are often useless, for example they upscale 320x240 images into several resolutions like 1280x720, etc just to make sure it beats all search filters.
This is definitely not a win imo.
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I have two questions for you then. First, if you insist that you have not scraped data then can you offer an alternative explanation for the data being presented here? Second, it's pretty clear that the majority of at least the tech community hates what you do with the regwall. Do you not know how bad your site's behavior makes GIS for those of us who aren't interested in joining it? Or do you just not care?
I'm guessing that they use one or more third parties that do indeed scrape Google results but provide plausible deniability in the process. And I'd look very closely at the employment histories of principals at those nominal "third" parties. It's not that uncommon in this industry to find companies with exactly one customer, staffed entirely by ex-employees of that one customer.
Hey, I run the Growth team at Pinterest. I just wanted to comment on the article to be very clear and say we have never scraped Google search results either currently or at any time in the past.
Is growth an engineering/product led org? Does it have a marketing leader as well?
I've come across a couple instances where growth responsibilities seem not in the land of marketing and I'm curious how those teams are structured and why.
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If only there was a way to track the number of seconds they spent on pinterest until the back button was hit and... factor that in as a feature in ML. voila.
I don't think it's that simple. When a user goes back to image search results, is it because they are unsatisfied with the result they clicked on, or are they looking for even more, hoping to compare? And when a user closes out instead of doing back, is it because they got what they wanted or because the results were so garbage they gave up? Based on my own usage of image search results I don't think you would be abl…
#1 might be confused for not finding the intended result, but could be discerned after looking a bit more.
Also, if a lot of people add in "-site:pinterest.*" (or click on pinterest sites but come back, then find the intended result) that might be a hint it's not adding real value.
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Yeah I don’t get it. Panda was supposed to clean up results - and it did for a while. Seems priorities changed. Kinda makes me wonder if someone higher up at Google is invested in Pinterest.
Panda was lead by Amit Singhal who was very serious about search relevance. He was kicked out for his sexual behavior though (and also because the leadership wanted to go towards more complex machine learning, while Amit believed in the more explainable models at that time).
That's a serious charge. To my, knowledge, sexual harassment was alleged but not proven.
Can you point to any evidence supporting your allegation?
Let's not forget that it's easy to allege but our legal system requires proof.
Justin Bieber and Chris D'Elia were recently alleged to have done bad things; both have provided evidence that the alleged misdeeds never happened.
Justin Bieber is suing for defamation.
Here's some info about the D'Elia allegations: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8459337/Chris-DElia...