I think they've also done some stuff at different times to displace Facebook from somewhere or other, anyway my bet is as follows:

this is someone's project to get noticed for being innovative and moved on to somewhere else with more money and then this gets staffed with people not on the fast track who will try their best to get out of it and finally it will close down and if anyone has been suckered into using it they will write an article about how Google closed it down and then HN will repeat the ever expanding list of things Google has closed down. Something may have just made me cynical about Google products though.

Maybe just stop linking to pinterest pages or images and just link to the real pages pinterest is taking from? Pinterest is such a dark pattern of 7 clicks to actually see the damned image in google results.

The interesting thing is google knows alot about what is popular on pintrest

That's how you inch towards antitrust.