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Comment by pixelpoet | Hacker News Reader

It would be such a relief if they went under, I am so tired of pinterest thumbnails (just copies of other images on the net, but low res, appearing first and unusable) polluting my image search results! Just this weekend I installed a plugin called Unpinterested to add -site:pinterest.* to all searches automatically- instant relief.

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I just want to know why Google Images shows Pinterest at all. It is clearly misleading and just ripping images from other sites which should be the real results. Its almost like if Google search has decayed and Images is piggybacking off of Pinterest on purpose.

My guess would be that pinterest has done a much better job of image indexing than your random DIY blog. I'm not sure what all that entails but if anyone has done research to game the system it would be them.

I imagine explicitly excluding images from Pinterest creates some legal issue, if not from Pinterest itself then from how it's functioning as a service to let people steal images. Leaving sites like Pinterest in maybe allows them to say to Getty "it's not our fault if the host isn't taking measures to protect your content"

They don't have to exclude it, they can deprioritize it. It's done with other content.

Easy way to get hit with even more antitrust suits. Better to just leave it alone.

You can remove the login wall with uBlock Origin.

Go enable 'uBlock Annoyances' in the filter lists. Enable 'Fanboys annoyances' too.

Or if you just want to remove the results, add this to the filters - https://pastebin.com/MHbiNK9N

I had to enable the "AdGuard Annoyances" filter, with "Fanboy annoyances" it was still showing up.

Don't enable Adguard. Enable 'uBlock Annoyances'.

https://i.imgur.com/POboA3n.png

Too many filter lists will slow down your machine.

That’s still enabling a filter, so I don’t exactly understand your argument of not enabling too many filter lists.

Is there some particular reason not to enable the Adguard list over the uBlock one?

Adguard has 30,000 filters in the list. uBO Annoyances has 3000.

The uBO one is maintained by the devs themselves. Easier to report if something breaks.

It can also remove Instagram and Quora login-walls.

I expressed this same view on Twitter and I got a DM from a Pinterest software engineer who seemed to be an intelligent and thoughtful person but also seemed to be puzzled by my position, and genuinely unaware that this perception of Pinterest exists. There must be some other side of Pinterest that I've never seen, where it performs a useful function for its users?

I know two people who love Pinterest.

Both use the mobile app exclusively & basically just use it for moodboarding/inspiration. They interact with it entirely within the app and don't leave the app.

Is it possible this engineer is working on a part of the product that doesn't directly touch the web publishing side and is (relatively) unaware of that side of the business.

I've definitely met engineers who don't dogfood and wouldn't be aware of aspects of their company's product since they haven't used it themselves.

> There must be some other side of Pinterest that I've never seen, where it performs a useful function for its users?

Lots of female users use Pinterest for organizing pins for a wedding. Essentially, they are great as a wedding checklist planner.

I use Pinterest all the time. It has a truly _phenomenal_ similar image recommendation engine, which I use for finding art and design inspiration pictures. Particularly if I want to find reference images for drawing, I find one that looks roughly like I want and then scroll down to the recommended list and get inundated with an endless amount of similar images in that style. It is _so_ useful!

I agree that Pinterest's practices with Google search are pretty poor. But Pinterest as a standalone product is amazing.

70% of pinterest users, and 93% of pinterest usage is female. That's probably highly correlated to your (and HN userbase's) confusion about how Pinterest is perceived.

Yeah I signed up for Pinterest once and ticked "prefer not to specify" on the gender question. I also opted not to select any favourite/followed categories.

I was immediately inundated with bridal content and very little else.

There's lots of things mainly used by women but I still know what they're for and generally haven't needed to denounce them.

Bummer - that engineer is not an intelligent person.

I am yet to find at least a single spamming company whose owners would not be well aware of what they are - because if they are stupid enough to believe their own story they will be quickly taken over by someone who is well aware of their own BS.

I don't want to be a DDG shill but there are two advantages to using DDG over Google here:

1. Pinterest images appear much less frequently in image search results

2. When they do, they can still be directly linked to

I switched to DDG soley for this, and their 'view image' ACTUALLY shoots me to the actual image location, not some pinterest or gated site

I use DDG too but Google does much better the more specific you get. I probably end up opening Google at least 5 times a day because of annoying DDG results.

FYI, your last three comments were dead. I've vouched for them, but it could be worth contacting HN moderation to see what's up because none of your comments looked hellban-worthy.

Great extension, I always search for recipes using google images. Pinterest results show up ALL the time, quite often they either don't have the actual recipe, or the image is way better than the underlying recipe. They are just generally low quality results.

As a Pinterest and Duck Duck Go user, I don't know what you're talking about, but this comment feels like digital NIMBYism: "please don't exist, so I can recapture a little bit of how the past felt." Glad you found a work-around though.

Pinterest is a nice place for collecting ideas (photos) related to a hobby, in my case architecture from around the world. It's also (more commonly I think) used for coming up with style ideas, at both personal and home scales.

Pinterest is fine if you are looking for its content on its site. But if you want a direct shot to a picture and it happens to be off of Pinterest it can be rather obnoxious.

Google never promoted itself as a free image database so it's weird that people get so upset that it isn't one.

if you dont use pinterest for fun or have an account, it is the worst website on the internet, if you have to do a lot of google image searches.

> It would be such a relief if they went under, I am so tired of pinterest thumbnails

That's unlikely to happen as Pinterest is currently booming. Their global usage is growing fast for an already large social network. They have $1.7 billion in cash, with little to worry about financially for the next five plus years. Pinterest is likely to get a lot larger yet given their growth rate, they're up to 416 million monthly actives with zero serious threats in terms of competition. Facebook's attempt at building a competitor failed nearly immediately. As with LinkedIn, they occupy a niche in social media that they entirely own.

Who's the target user of Pinterest? My only interaction with them are their low quality image search results, I've never met anyone who used it.

I would add to this - teachers and education in general have a specific use for Pinterest. My spouse, and all of the teachers in the k-12 system we are associated with use it for classroom ideas ranging from basic bulletin board decorating to science experiments and literature lessons.

> Who's the target user of Pinterest?

Overwhelmingly their target base is women. If you look at their newer markets around the world, uptake is always dominated by that demographic. Pinterest doesn't release very detailed information on their user demograhpics, however I'd be surprised if it's not 2/3 women or greater.

I entirely agree with the annoyance of the Pinterest image mess in Google image search results, which has been going on for many years now. However there is a legitimate place for Pinterest in terms of what it does. The parent should primarily be annoyed with Google (which is intentionally - they're fully aware of what's going on - filling their image results with Pinterest images), not Pinterest.

You almost certainly have unless you don't interact with women ever.

I can't use it because of it's closed nature, but it has a very good set of image cataloging and sharing features. Add in the valuable network effects and I see why people use it for idea sharing/collaboration.

Purely anecdotal, but pinterest is the only social media network that my mother has ever signed up for. She and her friends use it for recipes and animal photos. I reckon the platform has managed to capture those for whom Facebook is too much of an information barrage, and Instagram is too youth-oriented or "me"-centric. From what I've seen, it's like a more innocuous Tumblr, without all the drama.

I'm a male and occasional user of Pinterest. I used it with my wife to collect and exchange images and ideas about interior design. I have a couple of male friends who have used it in a similar way. It's very good in suggesting visually related images. It is not an image search engine like Google, but rather a tool to organise and share collections of visual references. It seems to work great in areas where Google or DDG image search fail, because it relies on users organizing images, and seems to have a similarity graph for images. There are kinds of images you can easier find on Pinterest than on Google: haircut and fashion ideas, interior and architecture design, gardening and landscaping, some diy items, etc. When you have an idea how something looks, but don't know google keywords to find it.

I understand frustration of Google image search users. But pins in google search results are Google's problem. I switched to DDG myself, and find it more straightforward for keyword based image search.

My wife uses it for everything. From recipes, over things she might want to buy, to stuff she finds interesting.

I made an account on a lark and it's actually nice.

Their image related grouping works way better for the things I'm interested in (art/illustrations) than other sites.

Women.

And that niche is being a parasite on Google Image Search while offering crap results?

> And that niche is being a parasite on Google Image Search while offering crap results?

I believe your anger is misplaced, and directed at the wrong target as well. It's Google Images offering the crap results, and I think you already know that. Reddit is also loaded with plenty of low quality content, as is Imgur, as is Facebook, as is Twitter; all large social networks are flooded with epic piles of garbage; Google's search results are clearly the problem re Pinterest images showing up in Google image search.

To answer your 'question,' the 416 million monthly active users very obviously aren't staying with Pinterest just because Google Images has a lot of Pinterest image results.

I don't like TikTok, it doesn't appeal to me. The very short video clips mostly annoy me. I still fully understand why so many people use it. Google indexes their video content - I wouldn't blame TikTok if Google's video search turns to crap over time due to that, I'd blame Google.

OTOH the same logic would be to blame google when sites are using blackhat SEO. AFAIK pinterest does do greyhat (at best seo): they scrape images, feed them to google image search to get the best tags, and add then to the post.

You're saying that asking Google which terms best describe the pic, and writing that down next to the pic, is unethical SEO? At most it's some kind of theoretical IP infringement on Google's image recog algorithm.

I'm not talking about content quality!

When I find an image on Google search and I want to go to the source site, I want to see that exact image there.

Not scummy paywalled "I show Google something else than you" images.

Plus it's pretty obvious that in many cases they scraped the original, which then they outrank in SEO.

Google controls the Google preview, not Pinterest.

Pinterest is serving different content to the Google crawler than to Google search users.

The more likely avenue for relief is for much of it to be de-indexed as it is showing crawlers something different from a regular browser.

Is it still considered a social network let alone social media? I was under the impression it was more like a shop-by-image these days—I.e. most interactions are with products, not people.

This combined with the fact that Google images disables saving images from search results on Firefox mobile has got me angrier than it should a few times.

After two previous times of attempting to switch to DDG from Google I finally made the switch seemingly permanently earlier this year. DDG is really good these days. Very occasionally I'll send a query over to google, which is easy in Firefox with the "@google <search term>" syntax in the url bar. Usually only necessary for local news.

!g can save you a few keystrokes to do the same

It got so bad that I basically had to stop using Google image search for a while until I found that plugin also. It's made image search useful again.

I get that Pinterest has a dedicated userbase and get utility from it. But it's basically polluting search engines with spam at this point for non-users. I kind of don't get why it doesn't fall into the same problems that experts exchange did with showing google one thing and users a different thing for purposes of indexing. It resulted in them getting deprioritized and the main search working better as a result.

Thanks, instant install. This has annoyed me for years.

I would love it if google would let us block search results from some sites in the same way that we can block spam in our email.

You really want all their staff to lose their jobs just so your image search results experience is better? Seems a bit selfish don't you think? What about all the users that enjoy it?

I don't like pinterest and I get the frustration but come on, there are better solutions than "this thing bothers me so let's get rid of it completely."

Why use a spam filter for your email? Do you really want all the spammers to lose their jobs?

The user replied to a comment saying "It would be such a relief if they went under". Are you comparing using spam filters to a company going under?

They are comparing getting rid of spam to getting rid of useless pinterest results in their search. That is a pretty obvious comparison.

So, no. They are comparing "getting rid of" and "getting rid of".

>Seems a bit selfish don't you think?

So you want to ruin image search results experience for some people so that you can keep your job? That also selfish don't you think ?

Selfish goes both way.

Pinterest does not develop the Google search engine. If your search results are ruined it's because of Google.

companies don't have a right to exist why do people talk like this

So you want a company to go under because a small annoyance? Damn...

Also, let's not forget a lot of people use and love Pinterest and do great things with it, even if Google created bad UX for its image search

Either way, "Oh, $bigco is in the title? Let me just react to that!" is one of the worst parts of the HN comments section.

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