Pinterest is like a virus that infected the Google image search | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest is like a virus that infected the Google image search

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29 pointsscottmcdot16 comments

I work for Pinterest. If Google passed us the image hash in the referrer we could fix this. This is not borne of maliciousness but of the problem with crawling dynamic pages that change over time. With the image hash we could surface the image the user clicked on with relevant context. I’m told Google is working on a fix but I do not know the timeline nor do I work for the relevant internal Pinterest team. We have a great collection of images and attribution so I hope to see better synergy between Google Image Search and Pinterest soon. - With love.

Last time I checked, Pinterest was making the site practically unusable for unregistered users by bombarding you with nag screens if you were logged-out.

So even if you do serve relevant content in the image search, I'm not really helped if I need to become a Pinterest user to be able to use 2/3 of Google image search results.

Are you in the US by chance? To my knowledge this is not the case anymore in the US if you land on Pinterest via Google Search unless you try to take an action that only makes sense for an auth’d user (such as saving a Pin). I would like us to expand this to more countries but it is not my call.

If you aren’t in the US, could you provide an example of us throwing up a login screen if you click on an image? I don’t think we do that until scroll down to see more Pinterest content.

Not the US. If I open any link to a pin or try to browse a list, I get this: https://i.imgur.com/MQUoa2N.png

Note the lack of an [X] button. This popup is both modal and non-dismissable, so you can't even click on links to other unauth areas. For non-technical users, the literal only options are signing up or closing the tab.

It's not really a secret either. They wrote detailed posts on their tech blog about both the invention of the non-dismissable modal popup [1] and the descision to make the image the user was looking for less obvious compared to recommended content [2].

[1] https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/lessons-in-growth-... [2] https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/lessons-in-growth-...

Thank you for the reply. Those blog articles are indeed upsetting. The good news is they do not reflect our current attitude towards signup walls. I expect major changes soon, we've heavily staffed up the internal teams that deal with this so I expect a more elegant unauth experience in the future.

Thank you for having this conversation. Pinterest is a great place on the web to find images - however, so far I avoided it whenever I could because of the glimpses of the underlying philosophy you get. If that mindset is now truly changing, that would be great. In that case, the best of luck to you!

Thank you for your reply. I'm one of your very early adopters (that has left) and these days I can't help thinking that you are malicious.

Even if you fixed the hash issue, the dreaded "Sign up to see more" would still be there, right? You've done a great job making it near impossible to block that overlay.

Right now I do -inurl:pinterest to get you out of my Google search results. It works, but I'd be happier if you shared the images that people shared with you.

“Sign up to see more” is something we have removed for a large percent of our users (including all US users) and is something we are expanding as fast as we can while still allowing for growing a core user base in countries where it is relatively small. It’s a decision that’s complex and not my call but we hear the feedback loud and clear. To my knowledge in no country do we show the overlay immediately after clicking through on a Google search result. If you have a counter example please send it to me and I will share with the relevant internal team. ~Best

> “Sign up to see more” is something we have removed for a large percent of our users (including all US users) and is something we are expanding as fast as we can while still allowing for growing a core user base in countries where it is relatively small.

I guess Sweden is still a developing country over at Pinterest. :)

> To my knowledge in no country do we show the overlay immediately after clicking through on a Google search result.

It appears after scrolling about 700 pixels of images, usually just before I'm able to locate the image I found via Google Image Search... Looking forward to the day you ditch that dark gray pattern.

Thanks for your replies!

Although I'm not involved in SEO or these landing pages, I deeply care about the Pinterest experience and believe in the open web. So I spent the last day in passionate discussions with the relevant teams and leaders about how we can fix/improve these issues. I'm confident changes will be rolling out very soon, although of course I cannot promise anything specific.

In the meantime, I might suggest to consider using Pinterest directly for image searching. No bias of course ;). Thank you so much for your feedback.

You do indeed have a great collection of images. Any prospects for being able to filter search results by Creative Commons permissions ala Flickr?:

https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

I'm unaware of efforts in this area although that's a great idea, I will pass it on.

Very few of their images are uploaded directly by their creator (in stark contrast to Flickr). Most are shared by casual surfers (with little regard to copyright).

If there was a feature to set CC info, I guess most of that info would not be correct.

But why is it millions of other sites dont have this “issue”? and only you do?

The millions of other sites you're referring to are largely static urls. When you visit something like "/explore/room-ideas" on Pinterest, it's a vast collection that is continually changing. Google decides to choose one image from that page as the "representation" and surfaces it in Google Image search results. If we had the image hash, we could reverse-lookup exactly what Google's intentions were and give the user a better experience. There may be other alternatives, I am not on the internal team focused on improving this experience--that team is in direct contact with Google.

Downvoting this comment is childish.

While you might disagree with it, it is relevant to the topic at hand that someone from Pinterest is willing to not only comment on the matter but enter a dialogue.

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