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

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

#241

Post by johnsoft »

grishka wrote: post #84

Related: 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…

I've seen the same, but with GitHub scrapers. One is called something like HappyGit, another is called GitMemory. And a lot of times Google thinks GitMemory is the original, so the _actual_ original source (GitHub) never even appears. So then I have to go to GitHub and try to find the original myself using snippets of text. Really makes my blood boil.

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

#243

Post by wolco2 »

jedberg wrote: post #138
thaumaturgy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User: This service has a problem and it's not working well. Programmer: There's nothing wrong with the service, you just have to use [magic incantation] to make it work right. I've been hoping for 20 years that this kind of exchange would stop happening. Still hoping! :-)

I think your premise is wrong. The service isn't broken. I'd assume Google has enough people and data to know that it's doing what most people want. They were even kind enough to put in a workaround for the minority for whom it doesn't work well (which appears to be OP).

For the amount of people hired you would assume they had the best people.

But their hiring process is broken. They randomly hire a % of people who pass an algorithm test. It's so random that 70% of their workforce wouldn't be hired again if they had to go through that process.

The brand is so strong that people think anyone who makes it into google must be the best of the best. It's more like a random person who has studied leetcode.

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

#244

Post by BuzzwordBingo »

systemvoltage wrote: post #116

Pintrest has the worst UI/UX of any website. It is a cancer of the internet, contributes nothing and allows re-aggregation and front-running in Google search as a feature. It baffles me why people use this piece of shit.

Does it even have legitimate users? It seems to be a spam farm.

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

#245

Post by giancarlostoro »

caymanjim wrote: post #192
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

There use to be an easy way to configure your account to always block certain domains, but that's gone now, so you have to use -site per-query. Maybe there are browser plugins that help? I miss the old functionality. I only had to block about a dozen sites to get great search results. Maybe it'd be less viable now; I'd probably have to block hundreds or thousands of sites, and they'd keep breeding new ones.

You used to be able to tweak part of the URL in the Firefox google search thing, and append queries I thought so as well.

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

#247

Post by baobabKoodaa »

udioron wrote: post #37

I feel like pinterest is being a "placeholder"/"fallback"/"default" of the web. Each time I encounter quora or pinterest search results I am getting the feeling I was looking for something that does not have good online answer/content.

Did you look beyond the Quora / Pinterest / other SEO spam results? There's good content on the web for virtually any query, it's just often buried under mountains of SEO spam results.

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

#248

Post by bane »

mancerayder wrote: post #161
bane wrote: post #48

I solved this nonsense by installing a plugin in chrome that automatically adds -site:pinterest.* to all searches. Almost living in bliss ever since.

Care to share? A convenient, trustworthy plugin that lets you exclude sounds ideal. Anything for Firefox?

Unpinterested

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

#249

Post by [deleted] »

alisonkisk wrote: post #197
mrtksn wrote: post #56

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 am cynical. Maybe Google's own experiments show that users click more ads when they get frustrated of the Pinterest spam that is technically not spam enough to be removed from the index. What the users are going to do? Use Bing? Google's most optimised version is probably being an Ads search…

If that's the idea, isn't it easier to just show random junk? Why pinterest?

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by notacoward »

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.
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