Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack • Hacker News Board

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#71

Post by wolrah » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

jwegan wrote: post #56

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.

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?

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#72

Post by zsdgblh » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

blinding-streak wrote: post #10

There are certain sites like Wikipedia that improve the web's utility for all who use it, small and giant companies alike. Google search is improved by Wikipedia's existence. And then there are sites like Pinterest, that degrade the web's utility for the vast majority of people on Earth. It actually harms Google's search experience (obviously image search) and frustrates us that try to benignly browse images. Why doe…

The EU fined Google a great deal of money in part for reducing the prominence of user-hostile websites.

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#73

Post by nieve » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #37

fheld wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an answer but a data point: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...

Any chance of a summary for those who refuse to play TC/Yahoo's privacy game (which last time I did look in more depth made it pretty much impossible to completely opt out of tracking) beyond seeing the interstitial and hitting back?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200701160058/https://techcrunc...

I find the Resurrect Pages firefox extension very useful for a lot of paywalls.

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#74

Post by ryanb » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

jwegan wrote: post #56

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.

Can you help explain why the Pin descriptions are so similar (or often exactly the same) as what's in the SERPs elsewhere?

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#75

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

smcameron wrote: post #3

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.

[deleted]

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#76

Post by nikanj » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

jwegan wrote: post #56

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.

There's a Chrome extension [1] just to filter out Pinterest results, because Pinterest fills the results with crap. As the head of the team responsible for the need for this extension, are proud of the work you do?

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#77

Post by notacoward » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

wolrah wrote: post #71

jwegan wrote: post #56

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.

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.

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#78

Post by nimih » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

jwegan wrote: post #56

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.

At the point where you're actively polluting google search results as if you had such a scraping program, is this a meaningful distinction to make for anyone other than Google's TOS compliance team?

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#79

Post by xg15 » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

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...

Re: Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

#80

Post by stelonix » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:44 PM UTC

For some years now, Google Images has been pretty awful to navigate, all thanks to Pinterest. I do hope Google is just unaware of the mentioned "hack", because the other option is they do not care because Pinterest helps them through ads.

Note: I have not checked whether Pinterest has Adsense since I use Adblock. I'm going by some of the comments here.

A couple of days ago I was trying to find out better image search websites because google removed the feature to find images of an exact size. I was brought to Bing, but it also lacks that feature. It kept me up that night thinking how to make a better service and whether I'd have to scrape Google, which made me think of webcrawlers, site indexing... It's turtles all the way down, I can't imagine a solo developer (or startup) pulling it off. I know there are decentralized search attempts, but anything decentralized simply does not work for 2020.

So I ask here on HN, how could a power-user friendly http image search service work without depending on big corps? Is it just impossible and we need to keep praying billionaire CEOs will listen to us or it's simply something no one has done yet?