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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?

#61

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

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…

With Google featuring progressively more ads and Google content at the top of the results page, it's not clear if it's still in Google's self interest to give users the best results anymore.

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

#62

Post by knuckleheads »

Winterflow3r wrote: post #44
knuckleheads wrote: post #12

One big reason why Pinterest ranks so highly, and why you are seeing different tld's in the results, is because they have a variety of tld's that they use and those tld's all have separate crawl budgets from each other. So Google crawls Pinterest about an order of magnitude more than most other sites. You can read more about this here: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/how-switching-our-d... Source: I run a th…

This I did not know about and I'm surprised they don't get penalised by Google in some way at the display of search results stage. I mean sure, I suppose one can do the -pinterest trick, but it's still a bit weird that Google thinks search results that are pretty much the same site but from different tlds are not spammy. Do you think they will change this to prevent Pinterest from essentially spamming some search que…

Live by the SERP updates, die by the SERP updates. It's been at least two years now and Google seems fine with it (until maybe one day they aren't). I know it might annoy folks like you and I to get reposted pinterest images in our results but it might be that Google has done research and found that people like seeing pinterest in images and so that is why they are keeping them around. It's hard to say why they are there until Google says something about it, Google rankings are a black box at times.

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

#65

Post by chefandy »

rasz wrote: post #23
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…

What they are doing to get into google search is not the problem, the problem is all their links are scams, clicking on pinterest google images link lands you on a login screen, or on a farm of similar/adjacent images. Nowhere do they have the content you were actually looking for. TLDR: they are gaming google

It is there— it usually just takes pages of scrolling. I heard a 2nd-hand account which said their product team leadership knows this annoys the hell out of people, know it's an easy fix, but they do it anyway. If that's true, I'd guess they're ignoring Goodhart's Law with their engagement metrics and need to re-focus on their UX, though I don't have any first-hand insight into it.

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

#67

Post by TaylorAlexander »

maya24 wrote: post #47
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…

Stop using Google search. DDG works just as well

I’ve been using DDG as my default for years and it really fails to provide me helpful results for programming and Linux questions. I know this because I frustratingly have to add !g to queries all the time lately and I’m questioning my choice to default to DDG.

That said, I don’t like being tracked. It’s not clear to me if the quality of results I am seeing are due to Google’s tracking or not. (I suppose I could research this but I’ve not done so.)

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

#68

Post by npteljes »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #60
kauju wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do -pinterest in your search to filter

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! :-)

Services and users have different goals. Why is the helpful technologist the problem?

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

#69

Post by daveFNbuck »

fuzxi wrote: post #51
maya24 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using Google search. DDG works just as well

Would that this were true, but it's not. Searching for specific technical issues especially shows DDG's weakness.

Outside of searching for specific technical issues, DDG is pretty good. I use DDG for most of my searches and this is the first I've heard of search results being dominated by Pinterest, so it's at least better on that front.
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