Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcameron | Hacker News Reader

Back when I was an SRE at google for their web crawler, I thought they should de-index pinterest (did not get any traction with this). I still think they should de-index pinterest. I add "-site:pinterest.*" to all my image searches.

View on HN

You would have made my week if you have managed to convince them to do that. At the worst point Pintrest's spamming of Google Image Search pretty much rendered the service next to useless.

It wasn't a "growth hack" it was spam, plain and simple.

Yeah I don’t get it. Panda was supposed to clean up results - and it did for a while. Seems priorities changed. Kinda makes me wonder if someone higher up at Google is invested in Pinterest.

Panda was lead by Amit Singhal who was very serious about search relevance. He was kicked out for his sexual behavior though (and also because the leadership wanted to go towards more complex machine learning, while Amit believed in the more explainable models at that time).

> He was kicked out for his sexual behavior

That's a serious charge. To my, knowledge, sexual harassment was alleged but not proven.

Can you point to any evidence supporting your allegation?

Let's not forget that it's easy to allege but our legal system requires proof.

Justin Bieber and Chris D'Elia were recently alleged to have done bad things; both have provided evidence that the alleged misdeeds never happened.

Justin Bieber is suing for defamation.

Here's some info about the D'Elia allegations: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8459337/Chris-DElia...

Super interesting. A lot of people feel the same way. Why do you think you weren't able to get any traction for this?

They probably look at the metrics and see that a lot of people are going to the Pinterest results. That the results are garbage and undermine the Google images search experience is much harder to measure.

Welcome to the future.

Everything is decided by AI based on data we don't really understand.

If only there was a way to track the number of seconds they spent on pinterest until the back button was hit and... factor that in as a feature in ML. voila.

I don't think it's that simple. When a user goes back to image search results, is it because they are unsatisfied with the result they clicked on, or are they looking for even more, hoping to compare? And when a user closes out instead of doing back, is it because they got what they wanted or because the results were so garbage they gave up? Based on my own usage of image search results I don't think you would be able to tell when I was happy with the results or when I wasn't. But you can probably tell that my usage of image search went down when it started getting shitty due to this spam.

What are your use-cases for image search? Mine are pretty straightforward; find a higher quality/uncropped version or to find the source (article, recipe, or photo set). Use case #1 I click through save and exit. Use case #2 I engage like I would for web (text) search.

#1 might be confused for not finding the intended result, but could be discerned after looking a bit more.

Also, if a lot of people add in "-site:pinterest.*" (or click on pinterest sites but come back, then find the intended result) that might be a hint it's not adding real value.

I think my use cases are pretty varied, anything from looking for pictures of a place I'm considering going hiking, looking for different views of a product I'm considering purchasing, looking for other examples of an artists art, to trying to figure out where some image originated

No one said it had to do with AI. The point being made above is that while you and me may dislike Pinterest, the data may be showing that to most users, it's actually very valuable.

If anything, ML would be able to detect my and your use cases and intelligently hide Pinterest for us while hiding it for others. So chances are they aren't using ML yet which is why it's just favoring the majority rather than us (the minority).

This answer is super spot on, and this will be the story of our lives for a while.

It could be better than what we have now, assuming somewhat smart AI. Right now, data gives plausible deniability, and is the universal scapegoat - you get to do whatever you want, backing this up with misapplied A/B tests and telemetry, with zero statistical rigor. And if someone complains about your decisions, you point to these tests and that telemetry, and cry "we're a data driven company, and the data proves we're right".

I mean, it would help to be honest about the metrics that the A/B tests are evaluated against. If you optimize purely for growth and engagement, then your test results will reflect that - even moreso if your tests are scientifically sound.

I'm continually surprised how companies manage to sell "let's try to keep users glued to the screen as long as possible" as doing something for the general good.

I have little hope that the people not understanding their data today and lacking any statistical rigor will be able to train an AI to do better. Figuring out whether an AI gives you garbage results seems to be a harder problem than figuring out whether your own results are garbage.

But isn’t this a sign that it’s actually useful for people? At the same time I have to admit that google image search is probably their worst vertical.

I'd say it's more of a sign of what shows up highest in their index rather than any indication on the quality.

If people are actually navigating to the results and not bouncing immediately due to the login wall that is a sign that people are finding them useful.

Is it that weird to believe that lots of people have Pinterest logins?

With image search more than other types of search IMO, because the source of the image is less prominent than the image itself, so ignoring specific domains is harder. I've clicked Pinterest links over and over in google search when on my phone when I had no interest in them, but it's hard to avoid because it isn't always clear what is what.

There's an extension for that :) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...

And for a client side-only solution: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...

There's also a Firefox version of Unpinterested.

It's great. Adds '-site:pinterest.*' to every image search.

I run a plugin in Chrome that does that automatically for image searches. The pinterest results are pure trash and never provide me with what I'm looking for, but take up an excessive quantity of results for every search.

The same recommendation (add -site:pinterest.com) has 77k upvotes in r/LifeProTips

https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/hejbl0/lpt_whe...

I wish we could do the same for Shutterstock and all these useless stock image websites that have totally hacked Google image search yet Google won't do anything about them for some reason.

How do you search for previews of commercially available images then?

What I would like is an open protocol for media licenses. Some media-license.txt file with names of images (and wildcards) and license info.

  hero.jpg CC0
  *.PNG PD # public domain
  # A free preview of a proprietary image.
  Teaser.jpg preview

Everything not marked is considered proprietary, like now by default.

Then sites like shutterstock could clearly mark their previews of real images, and galleries of free images could mark their images as free to use, etc. This could be reflected in the search engines' UI.

Doesn't Google support this already as an advanced search feature?

Huh? I don't see anything wrong with that. If you search for an image and Google shows you that photo on a stock imagery site, I'd count that as a win -- they've correctly pointed you to the source of the image, rather than a downstream licensee of the image.

No like pinterest these sites too have heavily gamed image search and often end up pushing relevant search results.

Also the results are often useless, for example they upscale 320x240 images into several resolutions like 1280x720, etc just to make sure it beats all search filters.

This is definitely not a win imo.

And lyrics search sites that index songs for which they don't actually have lyrics.

And the many TV/film sites that list "release date", "air date", renewal, season N+1, and so forth, in their page titles & tags even though the page does not contain that information.

Those are really helpful for making memes though.

It really is unfortunate that you were not able to make any traction on this. Pinterest really is among the scurge of the internet.

This is much more difficult with Bing than it should be. I have to add a bunch of separate pinterest.* domains.

Thank you for trying. Pinterest really makes google image search a lot less useful.

Almost every time I use GIS there is an initial stage of "Fck I forgot to add -site:pinterest.".

Any other flags you throw on searches?

> add "-site:pinterest.*" to all my image searches

You just made my day. I don't know why I never thought of that.

Yeah, photo stock sites and pinterest (and pinterest-like sites) should be opt-in when using google image search.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com