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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Fucking quora!

For image search, fucking pinterest!

Pinterest is somehow getting its tentacles beyond image search now, too. I was recently researching interior paint colours and if I do a search like "interior colours dark walls" (NOT image search) then of the first 10 results there are 3(!!) Pinterest results from three different domains - .com, .co.nz and .co.uk (I'm sure your results will differ based on your region).

It's incredible to me that Google isn't doing SOMETHING to prevent Pinterest from duking their results, and actually seems to be losing ground to Pinterest's SEO dark patterns.

Of the remaining 6 results on that page, 3 of them were low-quality articles with generic language about paint schemes and lots of images, ALL of which had those little Pinterest share badges on them. I don't know it for a fact, but I strongly suspect that these ubiquitous types of websites are either produced in Pinterest's own content mills or are paid for by Pinterest marketing teams.

I really dont get how they've gotten away with it this long. Google killed off eHow relatively quickly after we started doing our shady SEO practices but yet...

You just weren't shady enough to get away with it.

I have a feeling it's not SEO, but that Google themselves are favoring more domains over another based on a hidden factor. If you search for recipes you get the same thing, a bunch of results from big media organizations but very few (or none at all) results from smaller forums, self-run sites etc.

If I were to put my cynical tinfoil hat on, I would say Google has optimized a lot of search results to be favored towards sites which heavily advertise/track their users. Google results are no longer "search term" being matched to "content" but there are additional layers which do more magic, like "is this publisher considered favorable or trustworthy to Google" and "will this result generate a positive ROI for Google".

Google has a team of human evaluators called Raters that use a criteria.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

You can read about what the criteria is, but in short, it directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites.

I... did not know this. It's good to know that Google is also responsible for killing the non-corporate web alongside Facebook and Twitter. And perhaps more insidiously.

This is (i think) also happening with youtube. There were a bunch of funny political videos a couple of years ago (eg. "Trump insult compilaton" etc., from different independent individuals), and searching for those terms now just shows videos from CNN, BBC, ABC, CNBC, and other corporate media houses.

That's a very cynical take away from a document saying expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are the most important measures of page quality.

I can see how forums would take a hit because users are anonymous, but personal blogs and niche websites should be rated high. Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines. This would seem to go more so for niche websites as demonstrated expertise should be more apparent.

Note that site reputation was listed as the very least important metric.

I doubt anyone else read all 168 pages, but can you direct me to the page that supports your claim? I didn't find anything that I would qualify as "directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites."

> Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines.

That is pretty exclusive, IMO.

Obviously I haven't read this whole thing during my lunch break but if what you say is true then it explains a lot about why search quality has suffered the last ten years.

Forums, personal blogs and niche websites are often exactly what I want.

Google for sure favors sites with its analytics code.

I know for a fact that isn't true. But I'm curious what gives you that impression?

The incentives are aligned for Google to do this. I'd like to believe that they don't.

Can you point to anything that might convince skeptical non-Googlers that Google does not do this?

Because to optimize the analytics, you optimize the site for analytics and inherently give Google more detailed data. There’s no way Google isn’t using that data.

Do you have a source for this?

Goddamn Pinterest. No I don't want to sign up for Pinterest just to look at this pic that Google Image Search thinks is available to the general internet!

WTF Google how do you still allow this crap?

Firefox still has "view image" option, fortunately.

If you right click on the larger image that appears in the dark sidebar popout in Chrome(ium), and select 'View image..' that also works (most of the time).

Problem with that is you'll be downloading the Google cached image, not the source imagine, so the quality is usually worse.

There is also this: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/view-image/ which puts the "view image" button back on to google image search results.

I haven't needed that, it just works when I click on the picture then right click on the drill down.

When I worked for google as SRE for the web crawler, I low key advocated for de-indexing pinterest, but didn't get anywhere, (this is unsurprising, I was a nobody there.) I have no insight into why they don't de-index pinterest, but I know pinterest was on the radar as a thing of some sort. Meantime, I just add "-site:pinterest.*" to image queries... which I gather is probably more or less the sort of thing this addon does.

You don't have to answer this if you don't feel like it, but I always wondered if "-site:food.bar" is a search signal against that web site when Google ranks domains.

It's sad, because Quora used to be kinda good, or at least better than Yahoo Answers. I was glad when Quora started to outcompete Yahoo Answers, but now Quora is full of long opinionated diatribes. It's been totally useless to me for the last 3 years.

>Quora used to be kinda good, or at least better than Yahoo Answers

I think that's what they call "damning with faint praise"

Indeed. I did a ctrl-f on the comments to see if someone had mentioned Pinterest already. Basically everyone I know who uses the internet consciously (as opposed to say people like my parents who "click the e on the desktop") would install this if this only came with this one website it blocks, period. And as others wrote not only in an image search, but for all searches. As soon as you search for something that can be vaguely expressed visually (home renovation, clothing, layout, ...) pinterest will somehow force its way into the results.

I just assumed that I failed to understand how pinterest works. Why is that even around?

How could they realistically lose money?

The idea behind pinterest is that unsuspecting users grant it legal immunity and full worldwide free distribution rights on everything that they "upload".

So basically, it's a convenience plugin for copyright infringement. Add some ads to other people's content and you're making money.

I wanted this article from years ago:

https://gizmodo.com/a-gasmask-becomes-the-most-terrifying-sh...

Googling “gas mask shower head” gave me a Pinterest dump for pages

Just tried this, and on the first page 2 are non-pinterest, and 7 pinterest of various tld. This pollution makes me hate pinterest with a passion.

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