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Comment by diveanon | Hacker News Reader

I honestly do not understand why google allows pinterest to wreck their image search.

I'm sure there is some sort of ad kick back, but it is just awful.

Its one of the main reasons I switched to duckduckgo as my default search.

Any GIS result that’s from Pinterest - I have NEVER been able to find the image shown in the preview on the resultant page.

Simple answer: Pinterest isn't for you

Less simple answer: Pinterest has 335 million active users for a reason. It's where people go to collect fantasy boyfriends from TV and movies (not a dig, it's a valid hobby), plan weddings, and generally anything where collecting images from around the web is useful. It's Pinboard for a completely different realm of niches from what you're familiar with.

Pinterest ranks because those results are useful for more people than they annoy.

> (not a dig, it's a valid hobby)

How is this valid? Seems like an awfully silly waste of time.

Who appointed you the fun czar?

I usurped the throne.

With all the personalization that Google employs, one should assume that it can figure this out or that it allows one to, for instance, in some setting, block Pinterest unless one explicitly ask for it by including the keyword “pinterest” in one's search.

Perhaps it should be possible to downvote search results to further create a better personalized effect — continually downvoting Pinterest should have a desired effect.

I've thought about this before, but it would be far to easily manipulated by bad actors - for example, one person says something that triggers the SJW/alt right/gamer/whatever crowd, then a million people downvote her website and her business is destroyed. It wouldn't work without a huge amount of moderation.

If the voting was just user-specific, that would be fantastic. Because I include a gobbledygook search term to exclude all Pinterest results, Google requires me to perform captchas very frequently, which isn't ideal either.

Try this:

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

As I said, it's a matter of personalization and wouldn't be visible to others.

It also acts as a pseudo-internet archive. The original images may not be easily found on the internet anymore, but Pinterest still has them scraped with broken clickthrough links. Which can be both useful and maddening.

> The original images may not be easily found on the internet anymore

They're not easily found because they come after 4 pages of Pinterest results in image search.

I’m talking more about the case in which you can search for an hour and check every result and it’s not anywhere anymore. But yes it’s often just ahead of the real result too.

Pinterest has proven useful many a times when I need to find photos, memes, graphics, evem retro computer catalog images!

On google images one can type -pinterest

More often than not the image is not in the pinterest result and it is always behind a login gate.

I understand the premise of pinterest, and have actually used it as a design board in the past.

My point is that as an image search result it is user hostile bullshit that frustrated me enough to stop using Google search as a daily tool.

You can talk about how I'm not the target all day, but that doesn't change the fact that it is an inferior user experience enabled by Google.

Maybe but the images being in google image search are worthless as one can not get to the actual image. (even by following the link)

'It's where people go to collect fantasy boyfriends from TV..'

This explains a lot.

> Its one of the main reasons I switched to duckduckgo as my default search.

Ditto. AMP and Pinterest are two daily frustrations with Google that pushed me to DDG. I would say DDG’s image search is clearly superior to Google’s, not only because it does a better job keeping out SEO spam. It also still allows you to link directly to the image.

Personally been very impressed with yandex image search lately. Their reverse search is like the good pre-ai google one where it actually searched for the image not just search for the ai defined content + color scheme.

Is there a way to just block a domain from my search results? I swear I used to be able to do this.

Per search, if you preface the site operator with - (e.g., -site:pinterest.com), it'll exclude that site. It doesn't help much because pinterest results pollute from multiple top level country domains.

Try -inurl:pinterest

`-site:domain.*` works to exclude all country codes.

Google used to have a Chrome extension called Personal Blocklist[1] for this but it's no longer available.

[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...

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

It's rather easy to keep it out:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=kabedon+-site%3Apin....

It's easier to just use a search engine that values user experience.

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