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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest is one of the worst sites on the internet and I will cherish the day it vanishes from Google image search results which will hopefully kill it off, leaving space for a superior competitor (one that doesn't hijack 50% of search results that are hidden behind a forced login). The same applies to Quora.

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If Google truly cared about improving search they would reinstitute the “block search results from this domain” feature that they used to have. They’d learn really quick which sites were relevant as I banished the ones you mentioned and many others to the nether realm. Next up would be recipe sites and blog posts that spend twenty minutes getting to the point so they can throw in as many SEO optimized keywords as they can and hit targets for length.

If Google brought that option back, I'd switch back from DuckDuckGo, privacy be damned.

DDG can exclude by domain:

    -site:pinterest.com

You can do the same in Google, but a durable option that I didn't have to type into the search field every time would be extremely useful.

It never left. You've always been able to restrict domains on Google. It's extremely useful.

You can still remove results from specific sites.

In the Google search box, you can use the minus sign (-) to eliminate results from specific queries or domains. And if you use the site: operator, you can restrict results from specific domains.

So to eliminate pinterest.com results from any search (normal or image search) just search like this:

  tallest bridges -site:pinterest.com

I added an extension to chrome that automatically adds this but unfortunately it seems to break Maps search.

No it used to have a little x by the result and you never had to see that domain again. That’s my recollection.

I can't seem to find the original comment but this at least removes those images from the results for me in uBlock Origin:

  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest."])
  google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1)

  duckduckgo.*##.tile:has(a[href*=".pinterest."])

The above filter causes a problem with gmail as reported by some user. The below filter seems to work properly on search according to the ublock team member.

google.###search .g:has(a[href=".pinterest."])

https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/f8aqi0/how_ca...

> one that doesn't hijack 50% of search results that are hidden behind a forced login

Recently Medium started to do the same thing. Google should start penalizing such results.

I always take screenshots of Pinterest images. They want to make it hard to save the pinterest image that you see on google search results. They want you to sign up. Haha. Well I guess they haven’t heard of screenshots before.

Irony being that wirthout the clickthrough and attribution, Pinterest is essentially a copyright pirating site.

I've been wondering about that actually. How do they get away with it when they are essentially just profitting off of other people's images

Because they “are just the platform”, and the early days was all about “make your own boards for your own purposes”. Once they had enough users they quickly transitioned to what we see now: game Google search results and force people to sign up.

The DMCA makes this sort of misbehavior legal. It’s a terrible law.

Without it, we also wouldn’t have YouTube, which would be a net win in my book.

What? It's illegal under the DMCA to do the shit that Pinterest/9gag/ifunny/etc. does, it's just that no one has the legal recource (i.e. lots of money) to do anything about it, save the massive rent-seeking entities like the RIAA. All the uploads of music albums by random users still exist on YouTube, but any ad revenue goes straight to the copyright holders.

The DMCA provides the platform with legal immunity as long as they honor takedown requests.

So, individuals are guilty until proven innocent, and platforms siphon money off the piracy. The government gets a single choke point for censorship.

A good way to extract original images in Firefox is ctrl+i -> the Media tab. There you should be able to download. Although some particularly hostile/fancy with their code sites have a way of breaking even that. Good thing we still have screenshots in modern computing.

It's against google rules to show different content to their crawler and the end user (images for the crawler, login for the user).

I‘m guessing players like Medium work around the rules by allowing X number of free (as in not logged-in) views. So it works if you open the link in private mode. But search engines could have the bot retry requests to check the website‘s honesty.

> But search engines could have the bot retry requests to check the website‘s honesty.

A simpler solution to this is just having a human check it.

Humans are expensive.

What I hate about Medium is that I don’t know whether I’m clicking a premium article or not on Google results.

If it’s a premium article that I don’t want to read or not what I’m looking for, I’ve wasted one of three of their free premium articles a month.

Since I’m not a paying member, I will have wait another month to read a premium article that I like, if I used up my free 3 articles.

Google should find and add a way to let me know that I’m clicking a paywall link, or don’t index them, so I’m able to avoid them

Just block their JavaScript and read to your hearts content.

Must say as a Duck Duck Go user I can't recall ever seeing Pinterest in my image search results. Just saying ;)

as a ddg user I wish it had an option to remove stock images; some queries seem to return nothing but same-looking watermarked images for sale. but no issues with pinterest which I occasionally use directly

I see them quite frequently. And now using -pinterest doesn't work anymore, because they caught on and that string doesn't exist in their results.

Edit: "they" being Pinterest, not DDG.

You can also exclude by domain:

    -site:pinterest.com

Pinterest has had many tlds for years to beat this trick.

> Google image search results

I hate this site with passion too, but it depends on what I want to do with my search. If I desperately want to find a particular picture from my vague descriptions, Pinterest has helped me quite a few times, since at least it gets indexed reliably (the original site often is not). So if someone has ever re-uploaded the image I want there, it at least can be found now (and it sometimes even includes a source link).

Recently I’ve started getting into some hobby stuff and Etsy provides nice links with things to buy. Pinterest results seem very similar and you click them and they are... a picture. Often of the same item that’s for sale on Etsy. It’s super frustrating.

We need another panda update.

I remember when Quora used to be one of the best sites on the Internet! :(

Wait, when was that?

I was using it heavily between 2013 and 2015. The content this period was great!

I 'member when it didn't camouflage sponsored posts as regular ones... Seemingly at a rate of 1:1 with normal posts

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