Comment by CM30
8 years ago
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.
No, it isn't.
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.
This brings up a great point. Why does Google not just extract whatever information Pinterest is providing and provide that directly in Google Images as SERP? If none of the content in Pinterest is original, what value are they providing the user?
Pinterest is the "experts-exchange.com" of digital imagery, except EE at least had (gated) original content.
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'...is almost no OC on Pinterest'
I think you are being charitable there?
> 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.
> 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.
Almost all the images on Pinterest are available elsewhere. If Pinterest results were not polluting Google images, the originals would surface easier.
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I don't really see a problem with targeting the biggest worst abuser. Not everything has to be a one-shot solution to grand problems.
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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.
There's definitely a large number of people who only visit sites through Google's homepage. Not the address bar or anything else (clicking links being the exception).
I worked this out by hearing about customer support calls for a new URL we had which hadn't yet been indexed by Google. All the callers having problems couldn't find the address bar. They thought the Google search box was it.
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Even then the suggestion further down this thread could work: include pinterest results only if the search query contains the word "pinterest".
If people then still complain because they expect google to read their mind and provide pinterest results for completely unrelated queries, I honestly don't have much compassion for them.
(Though if google wanted to, they could even make allowances for those people via profiling - e.g., if you know user X has clicked on many pinterest results in the past, always permit those results in their queries.)
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It might be a good habit. If you're typing URL manually, you can visit some fakebook instead of facebook and lose your password. But Google will correct you in this case.
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So it would be a good opportunity to learn the web, for those people.
Based on what I remember of their demographics, I would guess that you're right. What scares me is the number of LinkedIn users that are so unsavvy!
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.
Even if you're logged in there's a good chance you won't be able to find the image at all. Due to outdated Google index or some other issue I'm not sure...super annoying though.
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.
Call me crazy, but AOL in its prime was a bigger deal than Facebook. Facebook was capturing an existing market, while AOL was creating one. It took the social aspect of the web to the mainstream, while Facebook merely streamlined an existing paradigm. Be kind to thy elders.
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!
Don't assume people didn't read the link. It's against the guidelines here and frankly it's insulting. People can read the same article and still have different opinions.
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