111–119 of 119 posts
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.
Just an observation that this very specific denial without offering anything else makes me think that what they _actually_ do is probably controversial as well.
Just mentioning that Pinterest used to boast on their engineering blog how they designed the non-dismissable nag-screen [1] and how they increased engagement by making their landing pages more confusing [2]. Not surprised they hack their way through search. [1] https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in-growth-a... [2] https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in-growth-e...
This is fascinating in a potentially terrible way. In summary: when an image is posted, a reverse-image search is done and top results are scraped then added to a "More like this" section for the post. This ranks highly because it's exactly what Google already associates with that image, except now all in one page instead of across multiple pages. Applying this same method to other content (blog posts/pages and video…
> Applying this same method to other content (blog posts/pages and video posts) would, presumably, also work. I believe reddit started recently doing something like this for text and as a result has made google searching for reddit posts essentially useless. Basically when you view any post/thread while logged out there are a bunch of other threads shown on the page that have related text, with all the text of their…
Huh. Facepalm.
Is there any way to exclude portions of content from indexing?
Like maybe inlining robots directed pragmas:
blah blah blah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Meta...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Not all growth hacking is unethical. WePay's $100 bills in a big block of ice dropped off at the PayPal conference comes to mind. Or Dropbox giving you extra free quota for going through their tutorial, installing on a new device, or inviting a friend (where the friend also gets extra free quota).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Applying this same method to other content (blog posts/pages and video posts) would, presumably, also work. I believe reddit started recently doing something like this for text and as a result has made google searching for reddit posts essentially useless. Basically when you view any post/thread while logged out there are a bunch of other threads shown on the page that have related text, with all the text of their…
"...all the text of [the related] posts included collapsed in the HTML" Huh. Facepalm. Is there any way to exclude portions of content from indexing? Like maybe inlining robots directed pragmas: blah blah blah Or using meta tags to spec exclusions: FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Meta...
Reddit staff doesn't actually use the site that much (or at least that was my impression a couple years ago after having a meeting in the office and finding that I knew a lot more about the meme-art that users sent them than their staff did)-- so it wouldn't be shocking that they'd be indifferent to making google search unusable for users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What are your use-cases for image search? Mine are pretty straightforward; find a higher quality/uncropped version or to find the source (article, recipe, or photo set). Use case #1 I click through save and exit. Use case #2 I engage like I would for web (text) search. #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:pint…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They probably look at the metrics and see that a lot of people are going to the Pinterest results. That the results are garbage and undermine the Google images search experience is much harder to measure.
Welcome to the future. Everything is decided by AI based on data we don't really understand.
If anything, ML would be able to detect my and your use cases and intelligently hide Pinterest for us while hiding it for others. So chances are they aren't using ML yet which is why it's just favoring the majority rather than us (the minority).
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