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Comment by ghostcluster | Hacker News Reader

They should definitely drop Pinterest from Google Image Search results.

Quora and Pinterest are the worst parts of Google results. Also Google Images has been ruined. Used to be you could View Image and get the source image but now Google images hijacks that too. I gotta say I hate whoever decided that was ok. Do what I mean. Actually come to think of it I think this was due to copyright infringement case against Google. Stupid.

I believe the decision to remove that was forced on them by a lawsuit

The following HN thread has more details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16388833

FYI you can (for now) get the "View image" button back with this extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/view-image/

Here's a Chrome version too: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...

IIRC this was due to a lost court case:

> Almost two years ago, Getty Images filed antitrust charges against Google in the EU, taking issue with the company's image scraping techniques to display image search results. Earlier this week, Google and Getty Images announced a partnership and Getty withdrew its charges against Google. Changes like the removal of direct image links were apparently part of the agreement.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...

Meanwhile, the browser feature right click -> "View Image" still works for me on Firefox, as a replacement.

That only gets you the scaled down preview image. I have a Firefox extension that restores the "view original" button.

Image search in DDG still has the source images.

Quora and Pinterest are freaking poison, I don't like how often those things show up.

It just wastes my time when I'm looking for something.

Have you tried Bing's image search [1]? It's actually pretty great. Bigger previews, much better similarity navigation, easy access to image link, etc.

[1] https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Vija+Celmins

yandex also seems pretty good.

I second this, especially for similar photos.

DuckDuckGo is what I use for image search, it works about the same as Google did pre-change.

DuckDuckGo image search, too

Maybe I am missing something but I can get the image URL by right clicking>open image in new tab. This might not matter much to others but I hated them when they recently removed the option to filter image search results by exact dimensions.

Google images returns relatively in-specific and poor results. I have turned to using Yandex. They seem to be better at training their AI as to what is actualy in the images.

Google has basically given up on their image search product. For that matter, their main search product is getting product long in the tooth. It's in the position Microsoft was in during the old days of IE6. Yandex is a good option. Bing is another. I usually prefix my google searches with a domain these days. Instead of merely subtracting a domain, I fix it to a domain I know is good.

Google's IE6 search product needs its corresponding Firefox to give it a kick in the shorts.

Pinterest should just be blacklisted from Google altogether.

For years now I have used "-pinterest" on every regular search term I utilize (I bake that into any Google bookmark). Would applaud the removal of Pinterest from search results.

Excluding via search works but there is also a script [0] - not affiliated - which you can use to block other domains as well.

[0]: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

even google had their own extension to do this few years ago until they deleted it from the chrome web store, personal blocklist was called.

There is now another alternative, ublacklist

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...

This i do too with Quora too. It's too much

-site:pinterest.* (hmm, I have to put something here or else the asterisk disappears.)

This is the better option, since it does not hide sites which simply contain the word "pinterest", but are not pinterest.

There's a Chrome extension called Unpinterested! [1] that automatically adds this to all Google Image search queries.

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

There's a a chrome extension, from Google, which provide a personal search block list.

There was an extension from Google but they discontinued it. 3rd party alternatives exist though.

Google has given up on improving search, much like Microsoft did with IE6 when it became the dominant player. Only real competition would force them to start improving again.

Here is my own userscript that removes any matching URL portions from Google search. It does it in a fancy way with stylesheets so that you never see the Quora, etc results even temporarily before they're removed. It also fixes Google Images to link directly to images again, removes all the tracking URL obfuscations, and more.

https://code.byuu.org/google

Should be more robust than the other alternatives listed, but if not, let me know. I'm always up for improving it more. Contributions also welcome.

How do you execute this?

Use a add on like greasemonkey

Could you also make it to remove google amp?

I only use the script on my desktop, and so I've never seen an AMP result. I'd need to be able to use the 'inspect element' developer tool on mobile I suppose in order to see how to filter them. Not even sure the script works on mobile though.

Try this extension - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

Blacklists domains from search results in 1-click

Firefox Version https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/personal-bloc...

And instagram, since they require you to log in after like ten seconds.

For those who don't know, this is entirely client side. If you want, you can delete the overlay (single div) from the dom and remove an 'overflow: hidden' inline style, and continue to scroll the page and look at pictures without logging in.

Interesting, thanks! Is there an easy way to do that on mobile?

Not that I know. I really miss developer tools on mobile. Developer tools are practically required to be able to use the web these days.

I use this bookmark:

    javascript:(function(){(function () {var i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *');for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {if (getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'fixed') {elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);}}})();document.querySelector('body').style.setProperty('overflow','auto','important'); document.querySelector('html').style.setProperty('overflow','auto','important');})()

I do this already for so many sites these days. And it's fairly simple. I wouldn't mind an extension that automated this for me.

I use ublock origin for this. Just use the dropper to pick the element.

You can also block elements by text content [1], for those that did not know. I ran into a site that tried to counter uBlock by randomized class names, among other things, but was able to target it properly that way.

1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...

how do you update the inline style with ublock? (its something I've been trying to do)

"Behind The Overlay" :) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/behind-the-ov...

Lammy, you're doing the lord's work

Thank you!

For news sites that do this, you can use textise.net to render a text-only version of the page which will have what you want (the article text).

I can’t upvote this enough. It’s deeply spammy.

Pinterest is already deeply demoted. I'm using Pinterest results as a sign that there is literally nothing else that matches my search.

Part of search quality is serving nothing when there are no results. Putting a bunch of irrelevant Pinterest pages in the results, just because there are no good results, isn’t good for users.

I don't agree. I may be desperate for a result in some situations. If there's a small chance there's something useful out there, I still want to see it. I get to decide whether it's worth my time to look.

The problem with Pinterest is that often the image looks exactly like what you want - eg search for diy furniture plans and a lot of links are Pinterest. That image came from a source somewhere, but Pinterest has better SEO than the source.

I have had mixed results with that as a user - sometimes I get to see a few pages of scroll before the nag screen to sign up.. sometimes it seemed timed instead, like not even second page scroll.

Other times I was able to scroll through hundred on 'pins' before the sign up screen. I also remember times when I had three seconds to look at a screen and then most visuals are blocked by the sign up screen.

Not sure if they are playing with this on a global scale or if my ublock and similar plugins affect it.

The times when I could not see what I had expected - just an overlay nag screen, I certainly wish they were not in the results. Other times I found the curated visual content of pinterest to be better then google results or google image search.

I had thought the big G algo already punished for showing full content to the crawler but blocked content to average web browser.. however I had the feeling some time ago that some manual tweaking on google's side and perhaps pin's side started affecting how all that was working together or not.

Yes, dislike that one too, a grid of tiny images which if you click on them are still tiny and try to make you sign up

And many Google hits for Pinterest images land you on pages with dozens or hundreds of images, making it extremely difficult to find the actual image you searched for, and, from there, to find the original source of the image. The whole process seems designed to provide as little attribution to the original author of the image as possible.

Why does XKCD have to be SO relevant SO damn much?

https://xkcd.com/869/

Human greed is predictably predictable.

In other news, water is wet.

I would gladly pay Google $x/year for advanced features like weighting of domains, return of "+" (that actually worked), etc.

Would be a great feature to add to Google One? Or a reason to switch search engines, I guess.

Tampermonkey extension to blacklist domains from search:

http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

Isn't surrounding the term with quotes meant to do the same thing as "+" used to?

Yes, but it is an annoying pita, and the silly reason it was changed, but not changed back when the initiative collapsed, continues to rustle my jimmies.

"I would pay" seems to be the solution to everything on HN. Would you?

Amen. I miss results that aren’t just SEO optimizations. Sites like this hurt the quality of the web by suppressing results that are what people are searching for.

I installed a chrome extension called "Unpinterested!" which does just that - removes all pinterest results from image search.

It was one of those cases where I was getting ready to build it, and then I thought "wait, I bet this already exists for free." Sure enough....

Indeed. I always swear when I forget to add -Pinterest to my queries.

Gee the numbers of times I've had to add "-pinterest -quora". I wish there was just a permanent filter I could add in my Google serach settings.

The most worthless of search results.

Amen. It's useless.

It's horribly spammy. I just cannot imagine working for a company like Pinterest. If someone here works for Pinterest, I would love to know what it's like.

I just checked and there's still a sign up wall. It is not as blatant as it was before, but I can't spend more than 10 seconds or click on anything without getting it. Can't even enlarge the picture or visit the original website.

The spammy results problem is super easy to solve from Pinterest's side. Just make pages full of images non-indexable and provide simple pages with one single image and there will be no more spammy results.

By "easy" I mean technically. Pinterest is a scummy company and I doubt they'd lift a finger to make things better for the web and its users.

>The “spammy” results are when Google indexes a page full of images and picks a “representative” image.

No the spammy results are when I search for something on google, it gives me a Pinterest link that matches my search term exactly, the link has absolutely nothing to do with what I was actually searching for and if you click onto it, you're met with a page full of random Pinterest crap for about 3 seconds before it busts out a signup wall in your face and to top it off it'll take you at least 5 clicks of the back button to actually get off the page. I find it happens a lot searching for tutorials for things.

ETA: to address the original question, I find quora annoying, but a lot less than Pinterest. I actually do get decent results when I can view a page. It just seems to be random whether it throws an account wall up or not. I find copying and pasting a link to a related question into a new tab will sometimes work if I close the original tab first, but not always.

Just add a share=1 to the link and it will work

You are suggesting that Pinterest change the structure of its entire website to cater to Google's search algorithms. Doesn't make much sense to me. Why is it Pinterest's responsibility to change their whole website to cater to Google? Google could fix their search, instead. Pinterest offered to work with Google on this and Google refused.

So on what planet is Pinterest the bad guy, here? Because they didn't completely knee-cap their traffic because Google was too preoccupied to work with them on this issue? No. It's just a popular opinion to hate on Pinterest on HN and people like Google so the facts don't matter.

As far as the signup wall goes, well, that's on Google too. They could stop indexing sites that require registration at any point after clicking through. Goodbye Quora, goodbye Pinterest, goodbye New York Times.

With all due respect that doesn't seem like goggles problem. It's their game. Seo hacking and optimization is a thing and Pinterest has failed so bad at it as to have turned entire classes of potential customers away from their site. Same as quora. If we're, the customers that'd sooner leave a site than capitulate to unreasonable demands, known of and written off then so be it. However it is ignorant verging on dishonest to blame Google for Pinterests inability to optimize their site for Google and all of Pinterests customers.

How is this not a failure on Google’s part? Isn’t it a failure for Google to give me results from an unoptimized website? If I click on a Google search result and it takes me to something irrelevant to me, how has Google not failed?

I am very confused by your argument.

The grandparent post's content was deleted, but it pretty much said that the main reason Pinterest serves "spammy" results (where clicks don't lead to the clicked image) is because Google doesn't send them additional metadata telling which image was clicked.

Instead of fixing the structure of their goddamn website, they wanted Google to give them special treatment.

Btw, I agree with you however that Google serving garbage results was 100% Google's fault, though.

Oh, that makes a lot more sense now. Thanks for the clarification!

This is a much bigger problem than Quora that at least links to the right page.

Why? The Pinterest UX is god awful, but I often find stuff on there that I can't find elsewhere(easily).

Maybe you can filter out those results by domain? It would be nice if you could just add it as a setting, though.

Maybe they could provide those result for logged in users and leave out pinterest for everyone else.

I can see stuff on Pinterest and have never logged in. I don't think I'd support search engines removing Pinterest merely because it has a nag screen.

It's not the nag screen. I have a pinterest account and want it removed because it's almost always a dead end and it's full of spam.

If you are searching for something and find a link to pinterest and click on it ... then what? You see a bunch of images of the thing you are looking for: no article on bobcats, no way to buy "winter running shoes", no way to buy that book, ...

When you do find it on pinterest it's on a contextless image that links nowhere.

Many times I've been looking for some obscure part that I would like to purchase, only to find search results flooded with pinterest images of it that are utterly useless-- they don't even tell me what the part is called, and certainly don't let me find where the image came from.

If pinterest was using a GAN to generate plausible random images would we even know?

Maybe this is something I've never noticed, or I brushed it off without thinking about it. If that's what Pinterest is doing, then I can see why I'm being downvoted.

Would be nice if you could get the answer to a reasonable question without the down-votes though.

I wonder how much disagreement shows up online because the internet is so different for each of us... from just different interests to search customization.

We could both be completely right about our own experiences.

It makes sense too that if Pinterest is promoted hard enough to get an 'adequate' dosage to everyone, that some people are going to be overdosed really hard even before you begin to factor in differences in tolerance.

I routinely search with site filtering to eliminate it, but every time I forget it's like stubbing my toe and I feel dumb for forgetting the 19 character magic word required to get useful results. Doubly so because I often misspell it.

If the web were my shell I would have punched in "alias gis=..." long ago.

Why? I once found (for purely personal use) a unique picture which was exactly what I needed this way and that played a valuable role in my life. And the preview I could get without having to actually sign-in to Pinterest was sufficient for my purpose.

Because often the image that was indexed was in the related/other area of the page and is not on the page when you click on the link. Ever since Google removed the direct link to image feature from the search results page anything from pinterest.com is basically SEO spam.

> Because often the image that was indexed was in the related/other area of the page and is not on the page when you click on the link.

Every time I've been affected I could find the image in a couple of seconds of scrolling

> Ever since Google removed the direct link to image feature from the search results page

It's easy to add it back. Most of the people here (me included) use ad blockers, downloaders and stuff like probably violating the Google user agreement, they should not have any problem installing a small userscript/extension to forget about this problem as well.

Because instead of a direct link to the creator's accout you get this copy pasta and this bs: https://imgur.com/a/uhrFVvp

They don’t show that pop up anymore in the majority of countries when you come over from a google link.

Well, they show it here in Russia, but even then - you are still landing on a pinterest page instead of the original (say instagram or pixiv, or whatever).

And for the majority of people - this will be the final destination..

Without Pinterest in the image results, you might have instead found that same image on the creators page.

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