I don't see why Pinterest does this to themselves. My main exposure to them is through Google image search and links to their site.
So my first several experiences were like this. It left me with a terrible first impression. It makes me wonder if the whole site plays games and tries to waste my time.
I usually don't sign up for an account the first few times I encounter a site, so in my mind it's a pretty critical time to make a good impression. Instead they annoyed me so much I've practically decided never to create an account.
The main exposure I get from Pinterest is only frustration.
When I click, accidentally, on a pinterest link on google images, I land on a site which does not work unless I enable some javascript. Once enabled, it'll proceed to load several images, none of which are the image I look for because the google result linked to some tag or search result. After the page loaded, I might be redirected to a screen that suggests I should get a pinterest account.
Pinterest is basically search result spam, it isn't what you're looking for but hey, you could send the Pinterestian Prince your data anyway!
Agreed on this. What's surprising to meis their success despite the logged in experience not being better at all.
We're getting married, so my fiancée is (obviously) using pinterest for everything - her dress, themes, you name it. And the wedding planner we work with uses Pinterest too, we (try) to share it with them so they get an idea.
Even such a simple feature as sharing a board is a nightmare and wastes 5-10 minutes in every calls we have so the planner can finally find the board.
Or a crucial feature as "pinning" is even bad and obstructive. Be it with the chrome addon or whatever other system.
Really don't see how they got so popular and really wonder why no other competitor is entering the market and crushing them.
Network effect. Pinterest has claimed its niche (arts and crafts, wedding inspiration (the size of this niche never ceases to amaze me), home decoration, pictures of smoothies in mason jars (but never with a matching lid oddly enough), clothing, accessories, etc.), and has its share of loyal users. Any competitor would need to be at least twice as good to attract enough users for the network to shift to them.
Happy to help you share a board or pin from outside Pinterest. I've absolutely never had a problem with any of the things you mention. My problem with Pinterest is that it is way too commercial now with lots of links to buy and spam contained within images. I used to enjoy it but not so much now.
Look I know this is after the fact but it might help other people. You could just create one account and have the wedding planner log into the account. No sharing hassle involved.
I think a lot of their design is aggressively optimized for SEO and growth. Sadly though, this strategy seems to work (up to a point) even though the experience of individual users gets worse.
One of the things that makes me a little bonkers is when people A/B test, find something that works well for, say, 50% of the people, and then dust off their hands and call it done. Because 50% is a lot of people, so it must be good.
I'd rather that they ask, "Hey, is there something that would be good for the other half of the users?" Software being infinitely soft, we can often find ways to serve both groups.
If Pinterest were a person, we'd think it an asshole, always pulling a bait-and-switch and asking us to create an account in the same brusque way. How much would it really cost them to be more neighborly?
I had friends in Groupon who used this technique. They claimed that forced sign ups didn't really result in a high enough bounce rate, compared to the number of sign ups they got.
Data driven does a poor job of capturing user annoyance. Someone will tolerate being screwed a few times to get a discount. But after a while, it builds momentum.
Though in many cases, startups don't care. They just want to sell off their numbers and exit.
50% is overselling the success rate of login-walls from Google Images by a lot - probably multiple orders of magnitude. And I think you're significantly misrepresenting the A/B test's goal. It's not to find what works best for the most people, it's to find what works best for the company running the test.
If a login wall causes an account creation from 0.5% of people presented with the bait-and-switch, that's not compared to a 99.5% failure rate. It's contrasted with an account creation from 0.1% of people presented with the image they wanted with a "Click here to create an account" prompt in the corner, and it's five times as effective as that alternative.
The same story gets repeated here over and over again regarding the email newsletter sign-up form that steals focus halfway through a blog post. Yes, they increase your traceable readership more than anything else you could put in your blog (again, counting 1% vs 0.1%) . But there is a large percentage of the population who will close your blog permanently if you use them.
> It makes me wonder if the whole site plays games and tries to waste my time.
They seem to be desperate for traffic. I've been using it for a while, but recently they've sent me a wave of spam emails "suggesting" to me various content which has no relevancy for me and is not connected to anything I've been doing. I've unsubscribed from all their mails (I hope so) but now I am hesitant to even use the site again, so that I don't get more spam sent to me.
My guess is a very narrow focus on optimizing certain metrics and a mindset that encourages "growth hacking" and any other means to reach those goals, even at the cost of everything else. *
They seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to insert themselves between the site users visited intentionally to find what they were looking for (Google), and the site that actually provided what they were looking for.
They've essentially become a large MITM attack on Google Image results.
Edit: just tried a few arbitrary search strings on Google Images, it seems improved compared to the past few weeks/months, somewhat.
For some searches, Pinterest results didn't appear at all. For "esp8266 enclosure", only 1 out of 15 on the "front page" points to Pinterest, but the original image is still from Tindie, not Pinterest. The person who supposedly pinned that image describes themselves as "Creative Digital Marketing, Web designer, WebDev, crazy SEO".
Ok, maybe a real pin from a real person, maybe.
Then I decided to see what happens with a handful of more "NSFW" search terms. The number of Pinterest results varied but significantly increased overall.
For some terms, in the 3 rows of images visible without scrolling, there were 19 images, and 11 of them (57%) pointed to Pinterest. None of them were images originally posted on Pinterest, they all have a hover link to the original site.
However, even though Pinterest is providing a link to the original site on top of the image, clicking it doesn't always take you there.
A good bit of the time, Pinterest has chosen to redirect you to a "blocked site" page instead, and only after they have already displayed an image from a site that they deemed "inappropriate". And then shortly afterward a giant popup prompting the user to login or create an account filled the screen.
Search for things like "Acorn Tattoo", and similar terms and you find pinterest spam is all there is in the google image search results.
Their behavior is eerily reminiscent of expertsexchange, back in the day. They had a similar high ranking for lots of things, but the result-pages were all horrid and non-useful to actual visitors.
Happily stackexchange surpassed expertsexchange, and I hope that something comes to kick pinterest from its niche too - one of only two sites I wish to fail (the other being linkedin, for similar evil reasons).
Replying to myself after doing some additional testing.
I've now seen multiple examples of Pinterest hosting images with the "original link" being a Google Images search result page, complete with the huge URL query string intact.
While it's possible users who don't know how to find the original URL for an image are pinning Google Image pages instead, the accounts that have pinned them do not look like real people.
It really makes it look like Pinterest is crawling Google Images for specific search terms, auto-generating pages to match the results, and then manipulating Google to get their own pages to show up in Google instead.
It should, but this also illustrates a problem with Google Search that they'll need to grapple with in the future. Namely, that while they should treat all sites equally, in practicality there's not really much incentive to on their part.
Think about it. Let's say Google does remove Pinterest altogether, banning the site as a punishment for 'gaming' the system.
What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken. They won't know Google banned the site or what for, they'll just think 'Pinterest should be coming up, it isn't, so Google is broken'.
And I suspect that underpins a lot of instances where Google gives larger more popular sites and services a slap on the wrist for using black hat SEO. Google knows that if they really did treat them 'equally', then the average Joe would think Google's search engine was a broken mess because it doesn't bring up what they expect it to.
However, on the flip side by not banning them or punishing them, you get stuff like this where it seems like large sites are allowed to break rules with impunity and smaller ones are hit with the banhammer for a single offence. It's an interesting conundrum.
> Let's say Google does remove Pinterest altogether, banning the site as a punishment for 'gaming' the system.
> What then?
Pinterest takes 2 days to write some code and start showing us the content that Google indexes and fixes the complaint. They start complying with the same rules that apply to us, get indexed properly, and everybody's happy.
It's not like Pinterest is set in stone and we can never change what it does.
I think you're looking at this in exactly the wrong way: Pinterest is already getting special treatment and it's positive special treatment. I think that any other site that didn't have the clout of Pinterest would get explicitly downranked for this kind of behavior if it became as apparent.
Google lacks any incentive to screw with a site that has millions(?) of users, as it could have significant consequence, and so Pinterest gets away with what others wouldn't.
Or better, just demote them to the very end of the search results. Occasionally there might be images from Pinterest that are not found elsewhere on the internet. If someone wants to scroll the image SERP down to page 6 (or whatever) it doesn’t hurt to show them there.
Which is why they should have done it before Pinterest got so big in the first place.
And honestly I don't think any significant amount of people search Google images wanting Pinterest results. People want images, they don't care where they're from. AFAIK there is almost no OC on Pinterest anyway.
> And honestly I don't think any significant amount of people search Google images wanting Pinterest results.
My guess is, Since search is Google's wheel house, they had this discussion, looked at the data, and found that many users do want it in their results.
Anecdotally, I myself dont care. Most of my image searches are to get an understanding what I am looking for. Some number north of 90% of the time, I dont click the images
> And honestly I don't think any significant amount of people search Google images wanting Pinterest results.
Sure they do, if the picture on Pinterest is relevant to the search term; they wouldn't have clicked on the thumbnail if it wasn't close to (or exactly) what they were looking for.
The issue isn't that people don't want Pinterest, it's that they don't want the closed nature of Pinterest, and even then, it's less an issue with Pinterest and more just a closed web problem in general. Consider certain IT vendors who won't even let you look at their documentation without being a current customer or handing actual information over to a Sales Rep and having it verified, or forums that hide their content behind logins or paywalls. Pinterest is a big target because it's big and has a lot of artsy stuff that might be useful for a simple project, but you can replace Pinterest with dozens of sites and the same rants would apply. The Reddit post to me feels like it's railing against an easy target rather than the actual problem of a consistently closed web with absurd demands for access.
> What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken.
Would that be a problem for Google (or anyone else)? If a group of users specifically expects the results to come from Pinterest, they'd presumably be able to search on that site directly. For other searches, they'd presumably still use Google because there is no good alternative.
Additionally, as the reddit comment notes, the pinterest search results are technically against google's policies anyway as they require a login to be useful.
Not for an unbelievable number of people (according to my own anecdata.) There exist large numbers (extrapolating from aforementioned anecdata) of people who don't know you can just visit a website - they think it must first be "googled." I've witnessed on a single occasion an individual who accidentally went directly to facebook.com, didn't trust that they'd gotten facebook.com, proceeded to Google, entered 'facebook.com' in the search box, then selected the site from the search results.
I suspect (intuition via anecdata...) that much of the Pinterest's target audience has similar levels of technical awareness and ability.
It's actually the problem that Google would've had to grapple with in the past when facing off against AltaVista/Lycos/WebCrawler et al holding a measly 5% market share. Google traffic is way way way way more important to Pinterest than Pinterest is to Google search results, and the power flows accordingly. Nobody is switching to Bing for Pinterest image results.
Pinterest shouldn't need to be removed specifically — the fact that they (or any aggregator, including say Reddit) reference some image should be a signal that the referenced source is a more valuable search result. (I think there used to be search engine that used a method like that.)
I don't know what the problem is with implementing opt-in community block lists.
This gives blocking functionality, and offloads the responsibility to communities that users can subscribe to.
Google has done this kind of ranking adjustment for _years_. It's necessary in order to make sure the search results are relevant rather than hundreds of pages of SEO spam.
What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken. They won't know Google banned the site or what for, they'll just think 'Pinterest should be coming up, it isn't, so Google is broken'.
A problem that can be solved with a single line, “Pinterest results not included for x reasons” is no problem.
The rule they are breaking, is that when you google for an image and they show the image, then you click through to the page.. the image is not shown. If it shows a bunch of images and you scroll down to see more it requires you to login and I never got any further than that because its just annoying, but one of the reddit users says you even have to search for the image with the original search terms again but on pinterest.
Pintrest is projecting Facebook attitude with an AOL product.
They give the googlebot one answer and the user a different one. My understanding is that is a no-no.
Pintrest and Quora fit in this weird category like Expertsexchange; they get high search ranking because of the questions, but don’t deliver the answers.
While they're at it please remove Yelp. The page that comes up on mobile does not appear to be the one Google indexes. It only shows the first sentence of a few reviews. Clicking Read More or More Reviews bounces you straight to the Google Play Store to install the Yelp app.
Yelp has some of the worst practices in the industry. Quora at least shows you some of what you want, while Yelp will stop at nothing to force you to log in and/or download the app.
I suspect if Yelp clearly runs afoul of Google's policies (and "don't compete with Google" is not one of those policies) and the page rank demotions are explicitly documented to be because of chronic violations of such policies, then such lawsuits would be uphill battles at best.
While they are at it please remove LinkedIn. You can't actually view anything on any page without logging in. Why is it listed at all? Seems pretty deceptive to me.
I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I actually like W3schools. Most of their infamous errors are gone and they are usually more “to the point” than Mozilla docs, which are a sometimes too prolific and not as clear.
Does Google manually adjust weights? While I agree with you, I always supposed that Google weights websites according to their own algorithms, not because some moderator thinks that it's less informative. If w3schools is higher, probably there are technical reasons, for example more users prefer it (may be content is easier to understand).
When searching for things like that, I usually prefix my search with MDN, or even better, just use ddg for technical searches. These days, ddg is getting pretty good at showing results of typical coding/technical questions. If my search is for a very fringe/specific/new topic, I fall back to google (which you can from ddg with the `!g` prefix)
Back when I was writing a lot of C++ professionally I felt the same way about cplusplus.com vs. the (IMO much superior) cppreference.com. I'd love to be able to teach my search engine simple rules like "if a Wikipedia article matches my search, show it first" or "never show results from linkedin".
The examples w3schools have are useful, and MDN has less of them. But maybe that's my subjective experience. Still, I've made lots of use from both of them, and looking past the first hit should not be that difficult, especially for us programmers.
Both are good and I use both. There's something about the layout of w3schools I find nicer and quicker to read. Sometimes I spend about 10 seconds on the site and I'm done. That's the mark of a good UI when you're in and out in 10 seconds with the info you need.
While we're in the same vein, Google should remove the dumbed-down content altogether for anyone flagged as a "developer" by their algos, and replace it with man pages and source docs. MDN is a step up, but I usually skip past it, because the actual specification papers are most always better (except for ATOM and OpenLayers!).
LinkedIn is one of the top sites for dark UX patterns. It is 100% purposeful, just like Pinterest, and designed to increase the all important "engagement" metric.
Does anyone actually ‘engage’ in way other than trying to block their spam? Every 6 months or so they seem to break through and the crap piles up. I was just fighting them off this morning.
Quora presents a very different site to Google than it does to the reader ultimately. Google intentionally, knowingly ignores this fact and has for years. They could manually penalize Quora for breaking Google's search quality guidelines in numerous ways and they choose not to.
A user can't freely browse Quora page to page, whereas Google can. Presenting a different site to Google than you do to the user, is about as direct of a violation of their guidelines as you can get.
AFAIK, you always get the same page that was shown when coming from Google results. That IMO is enough - what is shown in the search results is an accurate reflection of the page you reach. Requiring that subsequent navigations within the site are also the same seems excessive (as you don't have the context of a results page that would make it seem misleading) and would be an overreach on Google's part IMO.
if you 3rd party log in w/ your google account you can browse pages the same as the spider. quora knows the google spider is the google spider, so they've got a pretty good argument of equivalence there... plus you can still open links in a new incognito tab if you want to bypass registration like I did for years (kinda clunky though, & I was definitely feeling annoyed w/ them at times too)
There's an 'anonymous mode' setting which doesn't tell people when you view their profiles. I'm not sure how it works vs. the 'see who viewed your profile' perk that they offer in their premium accounts.
Even if that's true, that means LinkedIn is presenting a different site to the reader than they are to the search engine spiders, which breaks Google's guidelines and should be heavily penalized accordingly (as it would be for any mortals).
Google can spider every page freely, going from link to link without having to sign up. A regular user can't. Where's the penalty from Google for that? Why is so much LinkedIn content indexed when the user can't have the same experience as Google does? It's very blatant hypocrisy.
Sometimes you can, and find out personal information or that used to be the case not long ago. I don't know under what conditions it takes but it's a bit like some news paywalls, I think. Incognito tabs won't work.
The "Block foo.com" links don't appear in the search result anymore, but if I visit the website and block it through the extension pop-up they are then eliminated from the search results in future searches.
I used to use Pinterest regularly. It was a good way to capture ideas and share them with others. Now I cringe whenever I accidentally click on a Pinterest link. The product is dead to me, there is zero chance I'd ever willingly install or open the app.
It's strange to see what was originally a useful tool turn into well-funded SEO spam.
A complicating factor in all of this is the unfolding anti-trust cases against Google and other large digital platforms (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...). Choices that Google might have once made to improve search results for users are now under extra regulatory scrutiny. I imagine Google executives would be very careful about making any moves that could be cast as freezing out competition, even if that competition is abusing Google's platform.
The most infuriating case is the reverse-image search. When I use reverse search for an image I'm trying to find a source or a complete version or context for an image flying about on social media.
And what I get is often a solid wall of Pinterest hits providing zero info.
>The most infuriating case is the reverse-image search.
Exactly, that is also in my experience when it is the most frustrating.
On "normal" searches (let's say searching for an electronic device of some kind, hoping to find the manufacturer/support/specs) what I find increasingly disturbing is the number of links for Amazon offerings.
That's correct, it is for normal sites. At a minimum it will get you a dramatic downranking that will practically remove all of your content from Google. LinkedIn and Quora are both protected from those rules for example, as with Pinterest. It's Silicon Valley back scratching.
It's also a very clear abuse of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, in my opinion. As anti-trust moves in on Google in the coming years, this should be held up as one of many examples of persistent market abuse and consumer harm (anti-competitive behavior, using the monopoly to restrict consumer choice).
I search for a lot of DIY stuff and frequently the image search results are on pinterest. Often the underlying link is shown as pinterest and not the original link (presumably because someone saved it from pinterest instead?) and I can't figure out the fucking original site.
Pinterest in search results is awful garbage, it seems.
To me the simplest solution would be to add 'Stop showing domain' in the drop down arrow under where they currently have 'Cached' in search results. It would be useful to users and also help Google understand when a site is annoying a bunch of people.
...Or is this an opportunity for an extension someone wants ot build where you can select sites/domains and it auto injects somnething like -site:pintrest.com into all searches.
LinkedIn requires logging in because the Supreme Court rules they couldn't really stop us from scraping public profiles. Forcing us to login makes it easier for them to control who has access to what content.
IAAL. There's been no Supreme Court ruling on the matter, only a district court decision ruling that the CFAA can't be used to charge scrapers with a crime. And that case is currently being appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, case no. 17-16783).
This makes no sense to me. Anyone willing to scrape a profile will create dummy accounts to do so. And even if this step somehow prevented data scraping, the network effect will make it extremely hard to compete with LinkedIn.
Will this allow different service to get into same space and then we will do "-site:pinterest.com -site:random.com"? Maybe than there will be space for new search engine that will do it for us?
That's a good exchange between user 'jquery' from Pinterest, assuming they're who they say they are, and user 'xg15'. Nice work raising the issue of nag screen and non-dismissable modal.
> "I'm searching for a specific piece of technical hardware "
What specific piece of technical hardware shows up anywhere near the first page of results in Google that's from pintrest? I can't think of a single time I've seen pintrest in the search results and I search for various technical things all the time? Just curious since this surprises me. I thought pintrest was non technical stuff usually.
Yep. I've encountered this way too many times. And you'll find the picture you're looking for and it will only be on Pinterest. Then you click on to Pinterest and there is zero context for the picture. WTF? No links. Nothing. I'll never understand Pinterest.
A bunch of arduino and other small easy beginner hardware is stuff that comes to mind. Since pintrest is about cataloguing project type things it can actually be quite relevant. Unfortunately.
I say don't get rid of it but give me the option to remove it from my search. There's a bunch of sites I would rather not see in my search all the time. Yes, I know I can do a custom search but I'd be happy to have a "not see x domain in my search" option. If I remember right there were other search engines in the past that had the option.
Some people in this thread are comparing the situation to that of news site paywalls and noting the recent change in google image search. I think there is something to the comparison and it highlights the fundamentally different opinions about the purpose of a search engine:
Users want a search engine to find information they are looking for.
Businesses and sites want a search engine to advertise which information they could provide - but not lead directly to the pieces of information in question.
I think it's worth to make this divide visible and start a discussion which kind of search engine we'd like to have.
There were some ways to block Pinterest continuous pestering for subscription, but it got annoying and rather than supporting a model I consider unfair to the users I removed them from my surfing list.
It should also be noted that most problems I read on the commentary here would be easily solved if Google re-enabled the discussion filter they conveniently removed years ago to prevent users to filter out commercial sites from their queries. That move was pure evil and thanks to it searching has become harder than before.
Googlers with the power to change things; if you're reading this you will make many people happy and return utility to google searches that currently end up with captive images and no context.
There's a problem bigger than Pinterest here: images AND any content that is not where Google expects them or can link to. The "infinite scrolling" fad contributes to this as there is no longer a page to link to. Google and Bing should penalize sites for making it difficult to link to specific images and content.
For example, they can create a "2 page down" rule. If it takes more than two presses of the Page Down button (or equivalent per mouse/finger) to see indexed content, then penalize their rank score.
why not just use a non-blocking banner at the bottom or top of the page? the only thing a wall does is piss people off since you are blocking the content that they came to see and it results in backlash like this? besides... isn't the whole pinterest model about getting exposure for the images that people post and getting people to sign up? i think that who ever is in charge needs to rethink what they are doing.
I have an account on Pinterest because I like the service but having to sign-in for the simplest of things surely bugs me. Sometimes I just want to see one image and I end up having to navigate a bunch of sign-in pages just to see something. Recently I've found myself skipping Pinterest pages just because of the hoop jumping that signing-in creates.
Been saying this myself for a while now and reporting Pintrest links when I can be bothered. Complete abuse of the system to use it as the top of their funnel and as usual people who advocate the service don't even realise it's doing this awful behaviour.
The way to exclude Pinterest from your search results, directly from the search box, is `-site:pinterest.`. It excludes all* Pinterest domains, but not other pages that mention it.
But I agree Pinterest should be completely removed by default.
as a workaround, if you get very polluted results on a particular Google search, you can add the search term "-site:pinterest.com" without quotation marks to your query, thereby narrowly excluding it.
Another way to look at it is that you need Pinterest results in google image search in order to help finding content on Pinterest that infringes your copyright.
I hate this business model of using your audience to steal other sites content. Why doesn't Google link directly to the source of the content instead of Pinterest anyway? Maybe they don't care; they did invent AMP, which has some parallels with the way Pinterest works.
Anyway, when I started using DuckDuckGo on my phone to get away from AMP - I noticed that whenever I search for recipes on DuckDuckGo - they generally link to a site called Yummly which is even worse than Pinterest. Please complain to DDG about this if you care!
And speaking of searching on my phone, Apple won't even let me change the search engine string to use "encrypted.google.com" which would have gotten me Google results without the awful AMP links.
My point in rambling on about all these different topics is that none of these asshole corporations seem to want to let me have control over anything. I don't want to live like this. Generally, when I get annoyed, I just stop playing their game. At this point I have stopped watching TV and I have left Facebook, Twitter and Reddit and I hope that you do too.
Someone gave an example of searching for "IBM Leapfrog" and getting numerous Pinterest results.
I tried that search and only got one Pinterest result in the top 10.
I had no problem getting the text and images using a text-only browser. Could Javascript be the enabler for this Pinterest/Google annoyance?
Here is a quick little script to dump all the text from a Pinterest page; note how much is devoted to SEO and ads. .jpg URLs are wrapped in anchor tags for convenience.
With respect to LinkedIn, here is an amusing experiment to test the theory that your time means nothing to some web developers: Try signing up for a temporary account with a 10-minute email address from 10minutemail.com. LinkedIn will not inform you that this is an unacceptable email address. LinkedIn will proceed to show you Google ReCaptchas for at least 10 minutes, and perhaps longer.
Some throw away email sites accept incoming email on any domain, so if you have a spare one you can just point your MX record to the site and use that as a throwaway email. I believe most sites don't do DNS lookups when checking for scrap email addresses.
Yeah, I've been sporadically trying them out for many many years and never lasted a week, until last year. I use DDG exclusively since half a year now and rarely even feel compelled to use !g google redirect. Congrats @yegg and the team!
2) there are plenty of irrelevant results in the image search (above [IBM leapfrog] returns many that aren't about the IBM leapfrog)
3) You have to clicky each image to bring up the card to find out what site it's pointing too. The site isn't shown in the status bar when you hover on the image link. Two of these links go to Pinterest:
I don't see the problem here. The most popular sites are showing up in search results. Pinterest is a popular site. It seems like that's the way search engines are supposed to work.
If you don't like the fact that Pinterest is a popular site, fair enough -- but that's a personal opinion, and it's not a good enough reason for Google or any other search engine to suppress Pinterest images in search results.
May I ask if you're affiliated with Pinterest in any way? I'm reading your responses and while I have a very open mind, I feel like you're really handwaving the obvious (to me and many others) problems Pinterest causes and defending them very strongly. This of course doesn't mean you're affiliated, I'm just curious.
I am also good friends with one of the original Pinterest engs and that person defends it in the same, almost irrational, way, but I probably would too if my stock value depended on Pinterest being ingrained into Google search results.
I have no affiliation with them. I don't like Pinterest more than anyone else here. I just don't see how Google is doing anything wrong. By the way, I'm not affiliated with Google either. I shouldn't have to say that.
However when I added Pinterest to my personal block list, I had to add: pinterest.com, .ie, .nz, .uk, .au, etc etc you get the idea.
It was actually that cancerous link spam behaviour that made me block them in the first place, as it diluted the quality of my Google results enough to force me into taking action.
I really feel bad for people who aren't savvy enough to know that blocking things like bad search result or advertisments is an option.
> The most popular sites are showing up in search results. Pinterest is a popular site. It seems like that's the way search engines are supposed to work.
I disagree. Search engines are supposed to find _useful_ sites. Every time I have come across a Pinterest link, I have either been presented with the image devoid of context or (much more commonly) asked to log in and just been presented with a generic list of Pinterest images. That isn't useful (and in fact actively frustrates what I'm trying to do).
No because of i Google 'dragon ball' , Pinterest spans "top 40 dragon ball images" and not just one clickbait, but 20. My search is filled with clickbait. If i press the link, the images are behind the login wall. Also all of their images are stolen from other websites. So it becomes impossible to find the source when all you see is clickbait.
I don't see why Pinterest does this to themselves. My main exposure to them is through Google image search and links to their site.
So my first several experiences were like this. It left me with a terrible first impression. It makes me wonder if the whole site plays games and tries to waste my time.
I usually don't sign up for an account the first few times I encounter a site, so in my mind it's a pretty critical time to make a good impression. Instead they annoyed me so much I've practically decided never to create an account.
The main exposure I get from Pinterest is only frustration.
When I click, accidentally, on a pinterest link on google images, I land on a site which does not work unless I enable some javascript. Once enabled, it'll proceed to load several images, none of which are the image I look for because the google result linked to some tag or search result. After the page loaded, I might be redirected to a screen that suggests I should get a pinterest account.
Pinterest is basically search result spam, it isn't what you're looking for but hey, you could send the Pinterestian Prince your data anyway!
Agreed on this. What's surprising to meis their success despite the logged in experience not being better at all.
We're getting married, so my fiancée is (obviously) using pinterest for everything - her dress, themes, you name it. And the wedding planner we work with uses Pinterest too, we (try) to share it with them so they get an idea.
Even such a simple feature as sharing a board is a nightmare and wastes 5-10 minutes in every calls we have so the planner can finally find the board. Or a crucial feature as "pinning" is even bad and obstructive. Be it with the chrome addon or whatever other system.
Really don't see how they got so popular and really wonder why no other competitor is entering the market and crushing them.
Network effect. Pinterest has claimed its niche (arts and crafts, wedding inspiration (the size of this niche never ceases to amaze me), home decoration, pictures of smoothies in mason jars (but never with a matching lid oddly enough), clothing, accessories, etc.), and has its share of loyal users. Any competitor would need to be at least twice as good to attract enough users for the network to shift to them.
My 2 cents : they are popular because they are pretty much the only ones in that pretty specific space.
It does not explain why no other company has tried to copycat them though.
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Happy to help you share a board or pin from outside Pinterest. I've absolutely never had a problem with any of the things you mention. My problem with Pinterest is that it is way too commercial now with lots of links to buy and spam contained within images. I used to enjoy it but not so much now.
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Look I know this is after the fact but it might help other people. You could just create one account and have the wedding planner log into the account. No sharing hassle involved.
I think a lot of their design is aggressively optimized for SEO and growth. Sadly though, this strategy seems to work (up to a point) even though the experience of individual users gets worse.
One of the things that makes me a little bonkers is when people A/B test, find something that works well for, say, 50% of the people, and then dust off their hands and call it done. Because 50% is a lot of people, so it must be good.
I'd rather that they ask, "Hey, is there something that would be good for the other half of the users?" Software being infinitely soft, we can often find ways to serve both groups.
If Pinterest were a person, we'd think it an asshole, always pulling a bait-and-switch and asking us to create an account in the same brusque way. How much would it really cost them to be more neighborly?
I had friends in Groupon who used this technique. They claimed that forced sign ups didn't really result in a high enough bounce rate, compared to the number of sign ups they got.
Data driven does a poor job of capturing user annoyance. Someone will tolerate being screwed a few times to get a discount. But after a while, it builds momentum.
Though in many cases, startups don't care. They just want to sell off their numbers and exit.
50% is overselling the success rate of login-walls from Google Images by a lot - probably multiple orders of magnitude. And I think you're significantly misrepresenting the A/B test's goal. It's not to find what works best for the most people, it's to find what works best for the company running the test.
If a login wall causes an account creation from 0.5% of people presented with the bait-and-switch, that's not compared to a 99.5% failure rate. It's contrasted with an account creation from 0.1% of people presented with the image they wanted with a "Click here to create an account" prompt in the corner, and it's five times as effective as that alternative.
The same story gets repeated here over and over again regarding the email newsletter sign-up form that steals focus halfway through a blog post. Yes, they increase your traceable readership more than anything else you could put in your blog (again, counting 1% vs 0.1%) . But there is a large percentage of the population who will close your blog permanently if you use them.
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> It makes me wonder if the whole site plays games and tries to waste my time.
They seem to be desperate for traffic. I've been using it for a while, but recently they've sent me a wave of spam emails "suggesting" to me various content which has no relevancy for me and is not connected to anything I've been doing. I've unsubscribed from all their mails (I hope so) but now I am hesitant to even use the site again, so that I don't get more spam sent to me.
Most likely someone was told that his bonus depends on improving the number of sign ups. Which he then did.
My guess is a very narrow focus on optimizing certain metrics and a mindset that encourages "growth hacking" and any other means to reach those goals, even at the cost of everything else. *
They even described the design process that lead to some of their terrible UI elements in their tech blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226029
(* which, I suspect, is the kind of mindset spammers need to rationalize their actions.)
Pinterest has no product. They only want traffic.
They seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to insert themselves between the site users visited intentionally to find what they were looking for (Google), and the site that actually provided what they were looking for.
They've essentially become a large MITM attack on Google Image results.
Edit: just tried a few arbitrary search strings on Google Images, it seems improved compared to the past few weeks/months, somewhat.
For some searches, Pinterest results didn't appear at all. For "esp8266 enclosure", only 1 out of 15 on the "front page" points to Pinterest, but the original image is still from Tindie, not Pinterest. The person who supposedly pinned that image describes themselves as "Creative Digital Marketing, Web designer, WebDev, crazy SEO".
Ok, maybe a real pin from a real person, maybe.
Then I decided to see what happens with a handful of more "NSFW" search terms. The number of Pinterest results varied but significantly increased overall.
For some terms, in the 3 rows of images visible without scrolling, there were 19 images, and 11 of them (57%) pointed to Pinterest. None of them were images originally posted on Pinterest, they all have a hover link to the original site.
However, even though Pinterest is providing a link to the original site on top of the image, clicking it doesn't always take you there.
A good bit of the time, Pinterest has chosen to redirect you to a "blocked site" page instead, and only after they have already displayed an image from a site that they deemed "inappropriate". And then shortly afterward a giant popup prompting the user to login or create an account filled the screen.
[1] (safe for work) https://i.imgur.com/XuOvwvi.jpg
Search for things like "Acorn Tattoo", and similar terms and you find pinterest spam is all there is in the google image search results.
Their behavior is eerily reminiscent of expertsexchange, back in the day. They had a similar high ranking for lots of things, but the result-pages were all horrid and non-useful to actual visitors.
Happily stackexchange surpassed expertsexchange, and I hope that something comes to kick pinterest from its niche too - one of only two sites I wish to fail (the other being linkedin, for similar evil reasons).
Replying to myself after doing some additional testing.
I've now seen multiple examples of Pinterest hosting images with the "original link" being a Google Images search result page, complete with the huge URL query string intact.
While it's possible users who don't know how to find the original URL for an image are pinning Google Image pages instead, the accounts that have pinned them do not look like real people.
It really makes it look like Pinterest is crawling Google Images for specific search terms, auto-generating pages to match the results, and then manipulating Google to get their own pages to show up in Google instead.
It should, but this also illustrates a problem with Google Search that they'll need to grapple with in the future. Namely, that while they should treat all sites equally, in practicality there's not really much incentive to on their part.
Think about it. Let's say Google does remove Pinterest altogether, banning the site as a punishment for 'gaming' the system.
What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken. They won't know Google banned the site or what for, they'll just think 'Pinterest should be coming up, it isn't, so Google is broken'.
And I suspect that underpins a lot of instances where Google gives larger more popular sites and services a slap on the wrist for using black hat SEO. Google knows that if they really did treat them 'equally', then the average Joe would think Google's search engine was a broken mess because it doesn't bring up what they expect it to.
However, on the flip side by not banning them or punishing them, you get stuff like this where it seems like large sites are allowed to break rules with impunity and smaller ones are hit with the banhammer for a single offence. It's an interesting conundrum.
> Let's say Google does remove Pinterest altogether, banning the site as a punishment for 'gaming' the system.
> What then?
Pinterest takes 2 days to write some code and start showing us the content that Google indexes and fixes the complaint. They start complying with the same rules that apply to us, get indexed properly, and everybody's happy.
It's not like Pinterest is set in stone and we can never change what it does.
I think you're looking at this in exactly the wrong way: Pinterest is already getting special treatment and it's positive special treatment. I think that any other site that didn't have the clout of Pinterest would get explicitly downranked for this kind of behavior if it became as apparent.
That's the idea OP meant.
Google lacks any incentive to screw with a site that has millions(?) of users, as it could have significant consequence, and so Pinterest gets away with what others wouldn't.
That’s exactly what op was saying.
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remove them only from all search results that don't include the word pintrest.
Search for pintrest, you get pintrest. Search for "widgets," pintrist is excluded. Search for "pintrist widgets," pintrist is included.
Or better, just demote them to the very end of the search results. Occasionally there might be images from Pinterest that are not found elsewhere on the internet. If someone wants to scroll the image SERP down to page 6 (or whatever) it doesn’t hurt to show them there.
Pinterest. Not that spelling is important or anything.
Which is why they should have done it before Pinterest got so big in the first place.
And honestly I don't think any significant amount of people search Google images wanting Pinterest results. People want images, they don't care where they're from. AFAIK there is almost no OC on Pinterest anyway.
>AFAIK there is almost no OC on Pinterest anyway.
And this is the key point. By removing Pinterest from the search results the user doesn't lose almost anything.
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> And honestly I don't think any significant amount of people search Google images wanting Pinterest results.
My guess is, Since search is Google's wheel house, they had this discussion, looked at the data, and found that many users do want it in their results.
Anecdotally, I myself dont care. Most of my image searches are to get an understanding what I am looking for. Some number north of 90% of the time, I dont click the images
> People want images, they don't care where they're from.
Right, which doesn't align with the incentives which push Google to follow copyright law.
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> And honestly I don't think any significant amount of people search Google images wanting Pinterest results.
Sure they do, if the picture on Pinterest is relevant to the search term; they wouldn't have clicked on the thumbnail if it wasn't close to (or exactly) what they were looking for.
The issue isn't that people don't want Pinterest, it's that they don't want the closed nature of Pinterest, and even then, it's less an issue with Pinterest and more just a closed web problem in general. Consider certain IT vendors who won't even let you look at their documentation without being a current customer or handing actual information over to a Sales Rep and having it verified, or forums that hide their content behind logins or paywalls. Pinterest is a big target because it's big and has a lot of artsy stuff that might be useful for a simple project, but you can replace Pinterest with dozens of sites and the same rants would apply. The Reddit post to me feels like it's railing against an easy target rather than the actual problem of a consistently closed web with absurd demands for access.
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> What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken.
Would that be a problem for Google (or anyone else)? If a group of users specifically expects the results to come from Pinterest, they'd presumably be able to search on that site directly. For other searches, they'd presumably still use Google because there is no good alternative.
Additionally, as the reddit comment notes, the pinterest search results are technically against google's policies anyway as they require a login to be useful.
"...search on that site directly."
Not for an unbelievable number of people (according to my own anecdata.) There exist large numbers (extrapolating from aforementioned anecdata) of people who don't know you can just visit a website - they think it must first be "googled." I've witnessed on a single occasion an individual who accidentally went directly to facebook.com, didn't trust that they'd gotten facebook.com, proceeded to Google, entered 'facebook.com' in the search box, then selected the site from the search results.
I suspect (intuition via anecdata...) that much of the Pinterest's target audience has similar levels of technical awareness and ability.
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It's actually the problem that Google would've had to grapple with in the past when facing off against AltaVista/Lycos/WebCrawler et al holding a measly 5% market share. Google traffic is way way way way more important to Pinterest than Pinterest is to Google search results, and the power flows accordingly. Nobody is switching to Bing for Pinterest image results.
Pinterest shouldn't need to be removed specifically — the fact that they (or any aggregator, including say Reddit) reference some image should be a signal that the referenced source is a more valuable search result. (I think there used to be search engine that used a method like that.)
I think Reddit is different. Reddit often has valuable commentary that can be more relevant then the linked content.
However I agree that Pintrest shouldn't be removed specifically. Sites that don't display any useful content to the user should be removed.
I would imagine that Google can approach Pinterest with a deadline.
Take measures to ensure that visitors can see these images without an account after being linked to them, or lose x% of your traffic overnight.
I don't know what the problem is with implementing opt-in community block lists. This gives blocking functionality, and offloads the responsibility to communities that users can subscribe to.
"Show auto-filtered results"
> What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken.
Also, this is censorship. You can say _this_ censorship is good just because it censors something you don't like.
Google has done this kind of ranking adjustment for _years_. It's necessary in order to make sure the search results are relevant rather than hundreds of pages of SEO spam.
Google has removed large sites in the past. The one that comes to mind is RapGenius a couple of years back
Google shouldn’t (and doesn’t) treat all sites equally. This has been the core of their business since day one.
What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken. They won't know Google banned the site or what for, they'll just think 'Pinterest should be coming up, it isn't, so Google is broken'.
A problem that can be solved with a single line, “Pinterest results not included for x reasons” is no problem.
What rules is Pinterest breaking?
And what would it mean for Google to treat "all sites equally"?
The rule they are breaking, is that when you google for an image and they show the image, then you click through to the page.. the image is not shown. If it shows a bunch of images and you scroll down to see more it requires you to login and I never got any further than that because its just annoying, but one of the reddit users says you even have to search for the image with the original search terms again but on pinterest.
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Pintrest is projecting Facebook attitude with an AOL product.
They give the googlebot one answer and the user a different one. My understanding is that is a no-no.
Pintrest and Quora fit in this weird category like Expertsexchange; they get high search ranking because of the questions, but don’t deliver the answers.
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The rule is simple. You can't present content differently to the crawler than to a user coming to your site from google.
This is why expertsexchange always had the answer at the bottom of the page and why most paywalls are disabled if referred from google.
Please read the link before commenting!
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While they're at it please remove Yelp. The page that comes up on mobile does not appear to be the one Google indexes. It only shows the first sentence of a few reviews. Clicking Read More or More Reviews bounces you straight to the Google Play Store to install the Yelp app.
Yelp has some of the worst practices in the industry. Quora at least shows you some of what you want, while Yelp will stop at nothing to force you to log in and/or download the app.
If they did this, they would get slammed with lawsuits considering their own rating system competes with Yelp.
I suspect if Yelp clearly runs afoul of Google's policies (and "don't compete with Google" is not one of those policies) and the page rank demotions are explicitly documented to be because of chronic violations of such policies, then such lawsuits would be uphill battles at best.
While they are at it please remove LinkedIn. You can't actually view anything on any page without logging in. Why is it listed at all? Seems pretty deceptive to me.
Oh and w3schools.com needs to go below MDN because it's less informative.
Even today I wanted to read about transform-origin and landed on w3schools [0], where MDN article [1] is clearly superior.
[0] https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_transform-origin.as...
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/transform-o...
I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I actually like W3schools. Most of their infamous errors are gone and they are usually more “to the point” than Mozilla docs, which are a sometimes too prolific and not as clear.
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Does Google manually adjust weights? While I agree with you, I always supposed that Google weights websites according to their own algorithms, not because some moderator thinks that it's less informative. If w3schools is higher, probably there are technical reasons, for example more users prefer it (may be content is easier to understand).
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I use the personal blocklist extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...) just to block w3schools.
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When searching for things like that, I usually prefix my search with MDN, or even better, just use ddg for technical searches. These days, ddg is getting pretty good at showing results of typical coding/technical questions. If my search is for a very fringe/specific/new topic, I fall back to google (which you can from ddg with the `!g` prefix)
Back when I was writing a lot of C++ professionally I felt the same way about cplusplus.com vs. the (IMO much superior) cppreference.com. I'd love to be able to teach my search engine simple rules like "if a Wikipedia article matches my search, show it first" or "never show results from linkedin".
As a noob I actually prefer w3school's page to start ... and then I'd read MDN.
Maybe the noob clicking behavior is influencing the ranking?
Perhaps, but at least they don't require you to signup just to view a stupid image.
The examples w3schools have are useful, and MDN has less of them. But maybe that's my subjective experience. Still, I've made lots of use from both of them, and looking past the first hit should not be that difficult, especially for us programmers.
Edit: funny that people downvote this.
Both are good and I use both. There's something about the layout of w3schools I find nicer and quicker to read. Sometimes I spend about 10 seconds on the site and I'm done. That's the mark of a good UI when you're in and out in 10 seconds with the info you need.
While we're in the same vein, Google should remove the dumbed-down content altogether for anyone flagged as a "developer" by their algos, and replace it with man pages and source docs. MDN is a step up, but I usually skip past it, because the actual specification papers are most always better (except for ATOM and OpenLayers!).
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LinkedIn is one of the top sites for dark UX patterns. It is 100% purposeful, just like Pinterest, and designed to increase the all important "engagement" metric.
Does anyone actually ‘engage’ in way other than trying to block their spam? Every 6 months or so they seem to break through and the crap piles up. I was just fighting them off this morning.
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And how about Google finally do something about Quora's aggressive abuse of their quality guidelines:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
Quora presents a very different site to Google than it does to the reader ultimately. Google intentionally, knowingly ignores this fact and has for years. They could manually penalize Quora for breaking Google's search quality guidelines in numerous ways and they choose not to.
A user can't freely browse Quora page to page, whereas Google can. Presenting a different site to Google than you do to the user, is about as direct of a violation of their guidelines as you can get.
AFAIK, you always get the same page that was shown when coming from Google results. That IMO is enough - what is shown in the search results is an accurate reflection of the page you reach. Requiring that subsequent navigations within the site are also the same seems excessive (as you don't have the context of a results page that would make it seem misleading) and would be an overreach on Google's part IMO.
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Quora is shit anyway, StackOverflow&Co is the superior platform.
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if you 3rd party log in w/ your google account you can browse pages the same as the spider. quora knows the google spider is the google spider, so they've got a pretty good argument of equivalence there... plus you can still open links in a new incognito tab if you want to bypass registration like I did for years (kinda clunky though, & I was definitely feeling annoyed w/ them at times too)
Can we also ban Elsevier and get Google to replace their links with Sci-Hub links?
On the version of Internet from the 90's?
Totally.
Could anything like that happen on the CommerceNet, post EME (Encrypted Media Extensions)? (Sept, 2017)
Hardly. (And your name is now on a list for suggesting something so subersive, citizen.)
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Fairly sure google isn't going to promote pirated content over above-board content, regardless of how a large part of the community feels about it.
ScienceDirect articles shouldn't be indexed unless they have a readable abstract. I realise that isn't quite where you're going though ;)
It’s also a trap if you forget you’re logged in and the user immediately gets notified you viewed their profile.
There's an 'anonymous mode' setting which doesn't tell people when you view their profiles. I'm not sure how it works vs. the 'see who viewed your profile' perk that they offer in their premium accounts.
If you come with a google referrer you can still see the basic information of a profile.
Even if that's true, that means LinkedIn is presenting a different site to the reader than they are to the search engine spiders, which breaks Google's guidelines and should be heavily penalized accordingly (as it would be for any mortals).
Google can spider every page freely, going from link to link without having to sign up. A regular user can't. Where's the penalty from Google for that? Why is so much LinkedIn content indexed when the user can't have the same experience as Google does? It's very blatant hypocrisy.
I haven't found this to be true in the last few months
Agree. On my profile page I have option to make it ‘public’ but still requires login to be seen. It’s completely deceptive imho.
There is an extension for Chrome named "LinkedIn for Unregistered Users" that works on the basic profile page.
They didn't used to require this, unless I'm mistaken that started post Microsoft acquisition.
> You can't actually view anything on any page without logging in
I believe you can, actually, in some cases. It's just most of the time they try to lock you out with a login screen.
And while they're at it, any news sites that hit you with a paywall when coming from Google results.
Sometimes you can, and find out personal information or that used to be the case not long ago. I don't know under what conditions it takes but it's a bit like some news paywalls, I think. Incognito tabs won't work.
And Facebook.
In days of old it was pretty easy to ban a site from your Google search results. It looks like they have removed that function.
I wonder why? I know I liked having certain low value (to me) sites not clutter up my results.
A little article about the feature, sorry it is going to try to throw an interrupting DIV at you– https://searchengineland.com/google-block-sites-feature-1464...
It's in the article you linked to, but I suppose Google expects everyone to use their Personal Blocklist Chrome extension now: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
One more reason for Google being a very scammy advertising company (they stopped being a search company years ago):
You can not blacklist entire TLDs, just individual subdomains.
Thanks to ICANN (and others?) there is hundreds of TLDs that are 100% full of spam. And they all are able to game the system.
Google has lost the SEO War IMHO.
If they are not willing to innovate they should be broken up via anti-trust.
It seems the extension is only half-working.
The "Block foo.com" links don't appear in the search result anymore, but if I visit the website and block it through the extension pop-up they are then eliminated from the search results in future searches.
Ah, so they removed it to peddle their Chrome browser.
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I used to use Pinterest regularly. It was a good way to capture ideas and share them with others. Now I cringe whenever I accidentally click on a Pinterest link. The product is dead to me, there is zero chance I'd ever willingly install or open the app.
It's strange to see what was originally a useful tool turn into well-funded SEO spam.
A complicating factor in all of this is the unfolding anti-trust cases against Google and other large digital platforms (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...). Choices that Google might have once made to improve search results for users are now under extra regulatory scrutiny. I imagine Google executives would be very careful about making any moves that could be cast as freezing out competition, even if that competition is abusing Google's platform.
The most infuriating case is the reverse-image search. When I use reverse search for an image I'm trying to find a source or a complete version or context for an image flying about on social media.
And what I get is often a solid wall of Pinterest hits providing zero info.
>The most infuriating case is the reverse-image search.
Exactly, that is also in my experience when it is the most frustrating.
On "normal" searches (let's say searching for an electronic device of some kind, hoping to find the manufacturer/support/specs) what I find increasingly disturbing is the number of links for Amazon offerings.
I always thought that presenting different content for Google Search Bot and users is bannable offence. Not so much for big businesses, it seems.
That's correct, it is for normal sites. At a minimum it will get you a dramatic downranking that will practically remove all of your content from Google. LinkedIn and Quora are both protected from those rules for example, as with Pinterest. It's Silicon Valley back scratching.
It's also a very clear abuse of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, in my opinion. As anti-trust moves in on Google in the coming years, this should be held up as one of many examples of persistent market abuse and consumer harm (anti-competitive behavior, using the monopoly to restrict consumer choice).
I search for a lot of DIY stuff and frequently the image search results are on pinterest. Often the underlying link is shown as pinterest and not the original link (presumably because someone saved it from pinterest instead?) and I can't figure out the fucking original site.
Pinterest in search results is awful garbage, it seems.
To me the simplest solution would be to add 'Stop showing domain' in the drop down arrow under where they currently have 'Cached' in search results. It would be useful to users and also help Google understand when a site is annoying a bunch of people.
...Or is this an opportunity for an extension someone wants ot build where you can select sites/domains and it auto injects somnething like -site:pintrest.com into all searches.
There is Google's own "Personal blocklist" extension that does exactly that
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
It doesn't actually.
The problem with Pinterest is in image results - the extension does nothing for them.
Second, the extension no longer works properly as it hasn't been updated in years.
LinkedIn requires logging in because the Supreme Court rules they couldn't really stop us from scraping public profiles. Forcing us to login makes it easier for them to control who has access to what content.
IAAL. There's been no Supreme Court ruling on the matter, only a district court decision ruling that the CFAA can't be used to charge scrapers with a crime. And that case is currently being appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, case no. 17-16783).
(thumbsup). But that's my overall take.
This makes no sense to me. Anyone willing to scrape a profile will create dummy accounts to do so. And even if this step somehow prevented data scraping, the network effect will make it extremely hard to compete with LinkedIn.
It is much more difficult to pretend to be a real person with a real job and real employment and education history with real connections.
Isn’t this the best practice for, like, everyone?
Name one social network that lets you view its content without a significant reg wall being displayed.
You can’t see a single tweet without logging into twitter.
Browsing Facebook? Good luck seeing past that login box that dominates half the browser screen.
Want information about a restaurant on Yelp besides its address? Better login.
Not sure why Pinterest is being singled out here.
Adding -site:pinterest.* to the search works too.
I agree that it's quite annoying, but you can already remove it yourself from the search results by adding "-site:pinterest.com" in the query.
I don't want to do that each time, plus pininterset.in or .br will takes it's place.
Do `-site:pinterest.*` to block all domains.
But I agree, I also don’t want to have to do that every time.
You can use pinterest.
Will this allow different service to get into same space and then we will do "-site:pinterest.com -site:random.com"? Maybe than there will be space for new search engine that will do it for us?
A few weeks ago I shared something very similar from r/Showerthoughts [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16220638
That's a good exchange between user 'jquery' from Pinterest, assuming they're who they say they are, and user 'xg15'. Nice work raising the issue of nag screen and non-dismissable modal.
> "I'm searching for a specific piece of technical hardware "
What specific piece of technical hardware shows up anywhere near the first page of results in Google that's from pintrest? I can't think of a single time I've seen pintrest in the search results and I search for various technical things all the time? Just curious since this surprises me. I thought pintrest was non technical stuff usually.
I'm a hobbyist woodworker.
I was recently searching for an unusual wood-joint, and I had to give up because the google search results were absolutely polluted with pinterest.
Yep. I've encountered this way too many times. And you'll find the picture you're looking for and it will only be on Pinterest. Then you click on to Pinterest and there is zero context for the picture. WTF? No links. Nothing. I'll never understand Pinterest.
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Did you try using search operators?
unusual wood joint -pinterest.com
- searches google for "unusual wood joint" minus any results from pinterest.com
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Interesting! Good answer, thanks :-)
A bunch of arduino and other small easy beginner hardware is stuff that comes to mind. Since pintrest is about cataloguing project type things it can actually be quite relevant. Unfortunately.
Also Interesting! Good answer, thanks :-)
I'm doing research on the GRiD compass and ibm leapfrog and pintrest completely (and uselessly) saturates my search results.
I say don't get rid of it but give me the option to remove it from my search. There's a bunch of sites I would rather not see in my search all the time. Yes, I know I can do a custom search but I'd be happy to have a "not see x domain in my search" option. If I remember right there were other search engines in the past that had the option.
Come on Google give me the option.
From the Reddit comments:
This extension can block domains from Google search and it's made by Google. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
Unfortunately it doesn't work on image searches.
good tip thx!
Some people in this thread are comparing the situation to that of news site paywalls and noting the recent change in google image search. I think there is something to the comparison and it highlights the fundamentally different opinions about the purpose of a search engine:
Users want a search engine to find information they are looking for.
Businesses and sites want a search engine to advertise which information they could provide - but not lead directly to the pieces of information in question.
I think it's worth to make this divide visible and start a discussion which kind of search engine we'd like to have.
There were some ways to block Pinterest continuous pestering for subscription, but it got annoying and rather than supporting a model I consider unfair to the users I removed them from my surfing list.
It should also be noted that most problems I read on the commentary here would be easily solved if Google re-enabled the discussion filter they conveniently removed years ago to prevent users to filter out commercial sites from their queries. That move was pure evil and thanks to it searching has become harder than before.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/Psb...
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...
Here's what I use to remove bad results:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
Unfortunately it doesn't work on image searches.
Just use -site:pinterest.com
Problem solved
Googlers with the power to change things; if you're reading this you will make many people happy and return utility to google searches that currently end up with captive images and no context.
There's a problem bigger than Pinterest here: images AND any content that is not where Google expects them or can link to. The "infinite scrolling" fad contributes to this as there is no longer a page to link to. Google and Bing should penalize sites for making it difficult to link to specific images and content.
For example, they can create a "2 page down" rule. If it takes more than two presses of the Page Down button (or equivalent per mouse/finger) to see indexed content, then penalize their rank score.
what i'll never understand is "why a wall?"
why not just use a non-blocking banner at the bottom or top of the page? the only thing a wall does is piss people off since you are blocking the content that they came to see and it results in backlash like this? besides... isn't the whole pinterest model about getting exposure for the images that people post and getting people to sign up? i think that who ever is in charge needs to rethink what they are doing.
Just A Bookmarklet that removes fixed elements like annoying signup overlays:
javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()
I have an account on Pinterest because I like the service but having to sign-in for the simplest of things surely bugs me. Sometimes I just want to see one image and I end up having to navigate a bunch of sign-in pages just to see something. Recently I've found myself skipping Pinterest pages just because of the hoop jumping that signing-in creates.
Meanwhile perhaps the Personal Blocklist by Google ads-on for Chrome can help?
Not sure if it works on image search also.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
Whether it works or not, if you think a bit about it, you need to use a google product (chrome) to correct a dis-service that google is making.
Along with istockphoto and the majority of stock photo sites for deceptively using the word "free".
I have an filter to hide pinterest from my image search results. All the white space, it's fantastic.
for ublock origin it's `##a[href*="pinimg"]` to filter on google image search.
But google offers the option to put a minus signal before the name of the site you do not want receive results from. Is a filter better than this?
search: concrete+houses -pinterest
My filter is part of the adblocker and kicks in every single time. That's way better, no need to remember adding it.
Been saying this myself for a while now and reporting Pintrest links when I can be bothered. Complete abuse of the system to use it as the top of their funnel and as usual people who advocate the service don't even realise it's doing this awful behaviour.
Quora too, please.
What's the issue with Quora?
The way to exclude Pinterest from your search results, directly from the search box, is `-site:pinterest.`. It excludes all* Pinterest domains, but not other pages that mention it.
But I agree Pinterest should be completely removed by default.
Is there a Firefox extension that can remove Pinterest links from Google search results?
It really is infuriating when I click them and get a signin page over a bunch of images that seem to have no relation to what I searched for.
as a workaround, if you get very polluted results on a particular Google search, you can add the search term "-site:pinterest.com" without quotation marks to your query, thereby narrowly excluding it.
Same could/should be said about Lyst when it comes to fashion.
Another way to look at it is that you need Pinterest results in google image search in order to help finding content on Pinterest that infringes your copyright.
How many users does pinterest have? Is it popular and still growing? Why are they not going public yet?
I have never knowingly gone to Pinterest and so don’t know much about it.
When I get a Pinterest login popup, I just click the button at the bottom that says "Not now". Then I can browse the images.
It may be unrelated but what I find annoying is how pinch to zoom is so broken for Google image search using Safari on an iPhone.
So I'm probably not the only one who adds "-pinterest" to my searches. Never signing up for pinterest.
/offtopic
I for one really dig Pinterest for my artsy hobbies. It's like a internet-curated image search with some quality assurance.
Love it.
All my google images searches now include "-pinterest". This has only recently been necessary. Why?
Perhaps you need this?
https://openuserjs.org/scripts/laidbacktempo/Google_View_Ima...
Monopoly and complacent governements
And the worst part is, I don't even understand WTF Pinterest is.
[what I want to search] -site:pinterest.com
I hate this business model of using your audience to steal other sites content. Why doesn't Google link directly to the source of the content instead of Pinterest anyway? Maybe they don't care; they did invent AMP, which has some parallels with the way Pinterest works.
Anyway, when I started using DuckDuckGo on my phone to get away from AMP - I noticed that whenever I search for recipes on DuckDuckGo - they generally link to a site called Yummly which is even worse than Pinterest. Please complain to DDG about this if you care!
And speaking of searching on my phone, Apple won't even let me change the search engine string to use "encrypted.google.com" which would have gotten me Google results without the awful AMP links.
My point in rambling on about all these different topics is that none of these asshole corporations seem to want to let me have control over anything. I don't want to live like this. Generally, when I get annoyed, I just stop playing their game. At this point I have stopped watching TV and I have left Facebook, Twitter and Reddit and I hope that you do too.
I agree with you. You have to log in to every single website for the 'personalization sake'. I hate personalization and the login.
Someone gave an example of searching for "IBM Leapfrog" and getting numerous Pinterest results.
I tried that search and only got one Pinterest result in the top 10.
I had no problem getting the text and images using a text-only browser. Could Javascript be the enabler for this Pinterest/Google annoyance?
Here is a quick little script to dump all the text from a Pinterest page; note how much is devoted to SEO and ads. .jpg URLs are wrapped in anchor tags for convenience.
With respect to LinkedIn, here is an amusing experiment to test the theory that your time means nothing to some web developers: Try signing up for a temporary account with a 10-minute email address from 10minutemail.com. LinkedIn will not inform you that this is an unacceptable email address. LinkedIn will proceed to show you Google ReCaptchas for at least 10 minutes, and perhaps longer.
Some throw away email sites accept incoming email on any domain, so if you have a spare one you can just point your MX record to the site and use that as a throwaway email. I believe most sites don't do DNS lookups when checking for scrap email addresses.
I haven’t had any of these problems while using DuckDuckGo.com
Yeah, I've been sporadically trying them out for many many years and never lasted a week, until last year. I use DDG exclusively since half a year now and rarely even feel compelled to use !g google redirect. Congrats @yegg and the team!
I tried the same but I still find myself using !g all the time when I really want to find something.
I love DDG, but
1) there are plenty of Pinterest results in DDG image searches.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ibm+leapfrog&t=ffab&atb=v100-3&iax...
2) there are plenty of irrelevant results in the image search (above [IBM leapfrog] returns many that aren't about the IBM leapfrog)
3) You have to clicky each image to bring up the card to find out what site it's pointing too. The site isn't shown in the status bar when you hover on the image link. Two of these links go to Pinterest:
https://imgur.com/a/aLe1K
bing images or yandex images have less spam imho
Have to agree. Pinterest is a cancer to the Internet.
It's just not good for the world that a single company controls a basic fundamental function of the internet. It needs fixing.
Google Search needs to be replaced by an open source decentralized system. And then users themselves can control which sites do well and which don't.
I don't see the problem here. The most popular sites are showing up in search results. Pinterest is a popular site. It seems like that's the way search engines are supposed to work.
If you don't like the fact that Pinterest is a popular site, fair enough -- but that's a personal opinion, and it's not a good enough reason for Google or any other search engine to suppress Pinterest images in search results.
May I ask if you're affiliated with Pinterest in any way? I'm reading your responses and while I have a very open mind, I feel like you're really handwaving the obvious (to me and many others) problems Pinterest causes and defending them very strongly. This of course doesn't mean you're affiliated, I'm just curious.
I am also good friends with one of the original Pinterest engs and that person defends it in the same, almost irrational, way, but I probably would too if my stock value depended on Pinterest being ingrained into Google search results.
I have no affiliation with them. I don't like Pinterest more than anyone else here. I just don't see how Google is doing anything wrong. By the way, I'm not affiliated with Google either. I shouldn't have to say that.
> I don't see the problem
... because you didn't read the description of the problem on the Reddit post.
I read it. I still don't see the problem. A popular site ranks highly in search results.
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Sure, if there was a single return.
However when I added Pinterest to my personal block list, I had to add: pinterest.com, .ie, .nz, .uk, .au, etc etc you get the idea.
It was actually that cancerous link spam behaviour that made me block them in the first place, as it diluted the quality of my Google results enough to force me into taking action.
I really feel bad for people who aren't savvy enough to know that blocking things like bad search result or advertisments is an option.
> The most popular sites are showing up in search results. Pinterest is a popular site. It seems like that's the way search engines are supposed to work.
I disagree. Search engines are supposed to find _useful_ sites. Every time I have come across a Pinterest link, I have either been presented with the image devoid of context or (much more commonly) asked to log in and just been presented with a generic list of Pinterest images. That isn't useful (and in fact actively frustrates what I'm trying to do).
Edit: typo fix.
No because of i Google 'dragon ball' , Pinterest spans "top 40 dragon ball images" and not just one clickbait, but 20. My search is filled with clickbait. If i press the link, the images are behind the login wall. Also all of their images are stolen from other websites. So it becomes impossible to find the source when all you see is clickbait.
Man, fuck you.