Pinterest ruined photo search on the internet
inputmag.com
inputmag.com
For each result you can see multiple pages that include the image. It also shows the resolution and file size of each version. I did a test search for "bear" and clicked on the first result. It showed 14 different pages containing the same image with different sizes and possibly slightly different crops. You can also select a subsection of the image to search for that.
It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior.
I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content. This is a failing of Google image search for not showing alternate matches for the same image.
Bing has it figured out. I can't tell if Google just doesn't care enough about image search to implement it, or if there's some obscure patent preventing them from doing so.
They used to recognize that long term it's better to make the decision that the users would want even if it's worse short term. The company was founded on this principle when Larry and Sergey tried to sell pagerank to Overature search (iirc) - the Overature ceo at the time said good results were bad because users would leave the 'portal' page too soon and not see enough ads. That's partly what lead to them creating their own company. [0]
I'd guess Google is making an Overature like mistake today. I guess it could also be failure to operate on stuff like this at scale, which also isn't great.
[0]: I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this from Levy's In The Plex, but I read it years ago so not 100% sure this is accurate.
They'd have to disambiguate that from the obvious motivated reasoning that's likely to exist there too.
Even then, sometimes you know better than users when making long term bets about what you do, faster horses and all - it's part art and part science.
Average users are also not necessarily the best to optimize on. 99% of wikipedia users never write anything. Does that mean the users that write are relatively worthless?
!w <search> to search Wikipedia directly.
(semi-joking... but complaining about typing 3-5 letters is definitely a 1st world problem ;)
That is to say that Google image search is the real problem and not Pinterest.
Google was able to break out because they managed to retain great talent and was able to stay funded for a few critical years until their bets paid off. And they did so rather quickly.
I can't help but feel that we're back to a variant of the portal mindset. Only now it is more about B2B and spying on users. And it doesn't feel like Google does anything out of passion anymore. There's really no race to perfect technology - just to be good enough to stay ahead of competition.
The Google of old might have invested in image search to fulfil its potential. The Google of today probably sees it as waste of effort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHt98WE5FxU
My summation of the idea is that data is very valuable and will be more valuable in the future, but that because the value of a dataset goes up nonlinearly with its size, only the wealthiest will have the means to extract (significant) value from datasets in the future. This will cause massive societal inequality unless the people who create the data are guaranteed a piece of the value created by companies with the server farms necessary to actually create value out of the data we're constantly producing.
Yandex image search is also great, you can do semantic search by image and crop, much more advanced than Google. It's so good it feels like Pinterest without the fluff and user accounts.
Google at some point replaced identifying the exact image and finding different sizes/versions into some sort of machine learning problem where it tries (poorly) to identify the content of the image then shows you images that look similar but are usually not what you actually want.
EDIT: strange, i tried the same process again on the same image and this time it worked! i guess it really is a cache-related issue
The effect of this is it's in fact muuuuch easier to get at the original image in image search. Just right click the image and hit "view image" or "view image in new tab" and, that's the original.
What's annoying though is that Google doesn't show you the image sizes anymore. That's also relatively recent.
>A Pinterest spokesperson tells Input that the problem doesn’t lie with the company, but with search engines. “As a search engine, Google controls how results appear based on engagement and how useful searchers find the content.”
Google: "We allow shitty things because money."
Pinterest: "also money."
That's a bit reductive. I agree Google shares some blame, but Pinterest engages in some pretty serious black hat SEO techniques. This is well documented (and sadly not covered by this article, despite its title).
Except when images are scrubbed from results, such as "Tank Man."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
Microsoft blamed "accidental human error": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400774
Most of the time Google gives me a correct result ONLY if I know exactly what I'm searching for. But that's usually not the case.
Even for technical searches, I notice that many times, Bing gives a more varied search result which helps me.
Conversely, on Google after the first few links, the rest seem to skip some words from my search entirely. It feels as if Google is just trying to give me links to fill up the page and then I have to go back and put double-quotes against each term. Even after all that, I only get what I want more and more rarely.
Of late, I notice myself relying on Bing more frequently.
And that's yet another reason why I mostly use DDG/Bing now.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2gzi9/bing_searc... and https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2q4kw/rebing_sea...
Even the most basic website would have at least some information about the image.
To clarify, this isn't an issue if you get multiple versions of the image, in that case one of them is hopefully not from Pinterest.
I actually want Google to include these results, but I want it to warn me somehow so that I can make a choice to click on the result or not. If Pinterest is the only possible source for the image then I might make the choice to "pay" Pinternet (by giving them my info) in order to obtain the image.
We've got a former Pinterest employee on this thread describing how they'd specifically manipulated SEO for high SERP rankings. A commercial enterprise doesn't dedicate resources to a "growth SEO team" which coordinates efforts between Pinterest and Google if it doesn't expect a positive benefit from the effort.
But passing the buck to Google for the situation is a manifest and insincere attempt to absolve Pinterest of its culpability and role in precisely the issue TFA is addressing.
No: blame lies squarely with Pinterest, though Google are contributing.
Even as far back as the 90s many sites were putting "invisible" paragraphs in their pages to boost site ranking with often completely irrelevant keywords to what was actually on the page.
The early search engines that made it were the ones who put in the engineering effort to filter these kinds of tactics out. Google is just resting on their laurels as top dog in the search space and has been for a very long time.
But I'm repeating myself. Disengenuous argument is disengenuous.
Would that not be a first?
If you'd like to have a different discussion, you'll be wanting to have that with someone else.
Yes, Google have a problem.
At best, Pinterest exploited it. At worst, they actively worked with Google for some presumptive mutual benefit, screwing over the rest of the Web community.
Either way, Pinterest are culpable.
The proper response is to cut Pinterest out of search results.
Everyone, and their immediate family.
That's quite communist, don't you find?
They were pretty guarded and cagey about everything to be honest. Felt like a favor from a trusted internal contact but our contacts there would not share any details and mostly listen and occasionally confirm our guesses if it was public knowledge. Our meeting agendas were always prepared well in advance and very intentional.
Imagine a scenario where the original image was linked in the page as “main.jpg” or “flower.jpg”.
There may or may not be useful signals on the page for Google to infer from. In the case where the image is saved on Pinterest, the title may come from an expert user who submits, “Trumpet Daffodil”. This is a lot more precise and searchable.
We would go out of our way to append keywords to the end of page and image filenames to make those even more relevant. A final file name for this image would be, “eb761df34b9219ffc68e5c9e55a134f0—-trumpet-daffodil.jpg”
> What was Google's incentive for engaging with Pinterest?
The source in the article speaking about “size savings” of reducing images is clearly non-technical. That was not the reason as our S3 and CDN budget was essentially infinite.
I would say the main negative of Pinterest in image search results is when the target of your search isn’t the image but context around the image. It’s often lost if the image is reshared from an unrelated site or directly uploaded to Pinterest without relevant metadata (like the site it came from). I think a lot of people forget that GIS often gave contextually out of place images even before Pinterest but now there’s a consistent domain to associate with the frustration of missing context.
"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Flogging people disincentivizes them from showing up to discuss what they actually know about (i.e. their work), which is a strictly bad tradeoff for HN. You can make all your substantive points without that, so please do it that way instead.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=disincent%20by:dang&dateRange=...
Pinterest is intentionally designed to facilitate rich context around images. That’s kind of the whole idea and value proposition of the service.
Most “Pins” are created with the Pin-it button browser extension or JavaScript embed which associates the website the image is on and other context with that image and retained when “uploaded” to Pinterest.
In the long tail, yes- there are Pins that are void of context because of incorrect user submission (direct image upload) or broken links as a result of the website owner not redirecting when the content is moved. This was a continuous problem that everybody was interested in solving.
I really wish Google had a settings options checkbox labelled "Remove Pinterest results".
If the problem is significant enough to be a common meme, shouldn't search engines themselves be directly addressing the issue?
Because as it stands, I'm making a point of dropping search tools that provide worthless results. Yeah, Google, you.
Now Medium is a different story as the content is mostly original.
I see your point and I think you understand the product better than most in this thread but I think you’re minimizing the value of enrichment that “pins” over images or static links provide. In the same way, the comment section enriches news articles on hackernews and this site is worthy of indexing by Google.
Was Pinterest shady? No, not at all. Most employees were kind and genuine and trying to do the right thing. Was management and leadership all hyper corporate lizard people? Yes, absolutely. Was it a good company to work for as an engineer? I would say no.
The company constantly suffered from lack of quality technical leadership and as a result the lizard people were in control and the politics were of a company 10x at all times. Decisions were almost exclusively top down. Sound technical ideas were difficult to argue for because shady employees would lie and manipulate the lizard people. The lizard people only cared about self preservation and promotion.
I also think Ben and Evan were heavily influenced by their board (Ron Conway, et all) who saw a billion dollar company and wanted to not rock the boat until exit. It could have been so much more than a cash grab and yet I don’t feel like it ever was or ever will be.
> Specifically Pinterest image result clutter?
No, not at all and quite the opposite. If I see a result is on Pinterest, specifically a pin result, I’m more likely to click it because I know the image will be delivered fast (I was in charge of CDN strategy) and is two easy clicks to “download image”.
Often when I see other results, I’ll get to the page and there will be some irritating right click disabling script or I’ll have to hunt down the image and it’s a pain.
If the site it links to is dead, I’ll at least have an audit trail I can use to hunt the image down from the metadata on Pinterest.
So I would say, the incentive here was to increase search traffic and instigate user activation. Many folks now work at Reddit and are repeating the same playbook. Many folks cut their teeth at places like Facebook or travel search engines.
Sign up is free but if you’d rather not, just close the sign up nag.
Thanks for your patience in these threads, by the way. Not trying to dogpile on you or Pinterest.
hope it paid well
Also dismissing the nag screen as "not a problem for most people" completely omits the fact that it's still horribly annoying and continues to show constantly even when i've dismissed it a thousand times in my life. i'm not going to reward crappy behavior and clogging search results by registering for your site, and even if i did, i don't want to have to log in on a million devices and any time i use someone else's computer to avoid seeing it again
The images are scraped on behalf of user request along with relevant information from the originating webpage. The goal is that all pins on Pinterest are actionable (in nearly all cases, linking to the original webpage). The most often cause of missing links is for a website to go offline. In those cases, would you rather your Google image search return no results or for a cached image on Pinterest with a link to the original website which can be used for further digging.
> (probably violating the copyright holder’s rights in the process)
No, that’s not what is happening at all here.
Pinterest, like most sites hosting UGC is protected under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c) DMCA safe harbor laws.
The majority of pins on Pinterest are from the “pin-it button” a small snippet of JavaScript which content creators embed themselves on websites. Pinterest offers opt-out mechanisms but the majority of content creators see huge value in the additional traffic generated from Pinterest.
You're right it's only "possibly" infringement - there are cases where it wouldn't be (fair use) but the default is that generally speaking, it is, and I would be surprised if more than half the content on pinterest was there legally and with consent of the copyright owner.
I also have a Wikipedia account, a Stack Exchange account, a YouTube account, a HN account, and countless one-off forum accounts. This is just the reality of the modern web and per-user customization.
I see this kind of PR/marketing speech in all of your comments on this article. Do you do that inteantionally or have you actually gottent used to talk that way?
Do I have this wrong?
Pinterest is no different.
Hacker News does not try to get search engines to list Hacker News before those original sources.
- A search engine is good when it provides results that are useful and what you wanted.
- Seeing pinterest links in google search is not useful and not what people want (just read this thread)
- Therefore, by making pinterest results dominate google search, you have made google search worse.
- Google search is the main way people navigate the internet, so by making google search worse, you have made the internet worse.
Agree and I would add that the many relevant results you see today would not appear if it were not for Pinterest users adding context to images and the engineering work to surface these pages and exposing context in a way for Google to fairly rank.
> - Seeing pinterest links in google search is not useful and not what people want (just read this thread) > > Therefore, by making pinterest results dominate google search, you have made google search worse. > > Google search is the main way people navigate the internet, so by making google search worse, you have made the internet worse.
There’s a lot to unpack here so let’s just start with a simple question: I would ask, “worse” as measured by what?
Pinterest has staffed a team of dozens for almost 10 years to improve incoming traffic from search engines. Their effectiveness is measured by week over week increase in traffic and sustained use of the product from those users.
Literally 10s of millions of increased MAUs from this one channel alone. For these users, they are clearly finding value in the content that is being surfaced. Google also clearly sees value in surfacing these results over others. If you think Pinterest has somehow been pulling the sheepskin over Google’s eyes for over a decade, you’re mistaken.
I’ve worked for companies where I wasn’t the target demographic and I had to constantly remind myself that just because I wasn’t the target audience, that does not preclude a majority from realizing immense value.
You've given six years of your life laboriously manifesting something guided by robots (A/B testing, et al.) and uncompassionate bodies (lizard people, et al.)
What would you think the chances are that your actual resulting contraption is not specifically and solely an implement to ride the leverage of the monopolizing forces of the market? Or maybe an omnipresent vampire sloth, if that is more directly relatable?
Why do you think you were engaged in a net Good?
Incidentally, I ran away from high-tech in 2016, having understood what we're building (no matter the company) and who is pulling our levers (market trading robots). I did not need to hang around to see what it leads to, and couldn't bring myself to do it either. I was physically ill for years prior, and might have well medicated myself to literal termination; I got my wake-up call.
Do I need to be yours, or will you please shut yourself out for a week and reexamine your memories wrt/ conclusions and operating assumptions? You sound like a reasonable person thoroughly misled, I would not bother typing all of this out otherwise. Can you please try thinking for yourself, you can clearly do that well enough. Just shut it all out for a week and come talk to me then.
I'll listen.
This is a very easy one for me to answer: I saw the net good firsthand in our users’ faces. The most common response to telling someone where I worked was: “I love Pinterest!” and as a core user, I do too.
My favorite way to browse Pinterest is on an iPad late at night, bouncing around from idea to idea. Discovering interests I had no idea existed within me and inspiring me to be the best version of myself and try new things.
My Pinterest boards are the most honest, reflective, and personal things I’ve ever posted on the Internet. Every imperfect human part of me is on display.
https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/
I’m really sorry to hear about your bad experience in tech. I can relate and empathize with how you’ve felt and I hope you’ve arrived at a better place.
If you do ever want to chat my email is my hn username at gmail.com.
When and if you decide to do a no-device, no-news, no-people retreat I'll love to hear what you and not your environment have to say though.
Call me up then +9 72 58 666 1024
I am real, and I will listen.
Here are some test URLs which should all be publicly accessible without an account:
User page: https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/
Board page: https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/herpetology/
Snark aside, most people clearly aren’t expert users.
Scroll a little bit, the X is in the top left. We made that change in 2017 or so.
Just confirmed it still behaves this way on .com for keyword landing pages and direct links to pins (e.g search results, or shares from users).
Facebook seems to me to be actively search-hostile (it has no sitemaps pages --- there are none listed at https://facebook.com/robots.txt), and returns relatively few web search results compared to its alleged size (5 billion submissions per day last I heard).
That's ... in marked contrast to Pinterest, which actively solicits SEO and is overwhelmingly prevalent in image search results.
I do run many DDG sites via a bash function (see below). I suppose I could append a list of sites to exclude from results to that, though it would be somewhat ugly. That won't fix searches from a GUI browser though (unless I were to proxy those though some mechanism ... hrm...).
The bash function (any other browser could be substituted, I happen to like w3m):
ddg ()
{
/usr/bin/w3m "https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q=$*&kd=-1"
}> Pinterest, it should be noted, doesn’t cost anything to sign up for. But as the old internet maxim goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.’” Meanwhile, people who do use the service complain that the resolution of Pinterest images is often low.
It's annoying to make an account, but they are paying to host the image. That you want a particular image is already tracked by the other image hosts. It does not seem like a net loss of privacy.
One possibility is that Pinterest is really actually very popular and the people who reasonably hate the awful site are in the minority (which sucks for us but it's hard to be critical of their images coming up often). The other possibility is everyone hates Pinterest and Google is allowing their search to get gamed - and in that case the ball seems in Google's court? Like, your users hate your search, fix it.
Either way it seems like yelling at Pinterest for "ruining" photo search in one particular way is silly. They have either been so successful as to redefine how people want to access images or they're cheating.
Like other bad Google behavior related to controlling web spam, I reckon this drives more people to see Google ads on these sorts of sites, so they've taken an anti-user position. Same reason much of the "legitimate" web turned up in Google results now looks like a low effort click farm—if the clicks are making Google money, who cares if it's coming from garbage content?
I'm sure they used to do exactly this. Now, not only do they not do this, but they commit the same sin themselves! Recently I was clicking around Google Images looking for some chart data when I found a promising Google Docs link. Alas, "you must sign in to access this document". Get bent, Google.
By "Pinterest content" you of course mean, other peoples images you don't own but have harvested?
The real issue of course is that google is once again tolerating a site that allows indexing but won't allow linking to the actual content (used to be a problem with experts exchange IIR). Instead pinterest redirects to their page instead of the image.
Pinterest is index cancer.
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
Rather than having a system that looks like what I've just outlined and taking no notice whatsoever.
www.google.com##.isv-r:has-text(/pinterest.com/)
shameless plug: i've been maintaining a browser extension for a couple of years called 'google images restored' [0] which reverts google images to how it was before 2019. that extension, mixed with the ublock origin filter removing unwanted domains (pinterest, alamy, 123rf, etc), makes google images enjoyable again for me.
duckduckgo.com##.tile:has-text(/pinterest.com/)
I definitely recall that up until about 10 years ago ebay had a similar feature, where I could define various vendors that I wanted to exclude forever after.
Ebay has the two-master problem in spades, of course, but removing these types of features is an especially non-subtle reminder that as a consumer you're very low down on the corporation's care list.
Having to manually modify all my search queries forever more is an offensive cognitive burden.
You remember just fine, and probably got it to within a year or two. If google wanted to make money off something other than the ads I never click (if they even managed to be displayed): bring back the list, and name a reasonable price.
Because even though Pinterest will never resolve on our home network (lest you accidentally click a search result), there's no way I can find to not display those results to begin with. We need a Pi-Hole for search results.
I guess they've never heard of noindex? You can very easily remove your content from Google image search, you just like all the traffic.
Subject matter aside, this piece's journalism brought me much ire.
Did they really need Pinterest's failed acquisition to contextualize this article? It's not even discussed save for a throwaway comment at the end. Pinterest has been an annoyance to image searchers for a long time, are they suggesting that somehow PayPal didn't know, and upon discovery they too concluded, "Pinterest sucks and it has utterly ruined photo searching on the internet."
Is a HN thread with 24 upvotes now a means of "pleading" with Google engineers [0]?
Am I just getting mad at a low-quality, click-baity online magazine?
Sadly, Google weakened this principle in 2015 and abandoned it entirely in 2017:
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2015/09/first-clic...
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...
Google doesn't care anymore.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
...but if you decide to ban them I don't think anyone would ever consider it an "abuse of power" would they? Your service came with an element that's detrimental to my own... that seems like reasonable grounds for a ban.
I think this starts to approach conversations about how big is "too big." If a company or product is so large that a simple ban for bad behavior can be considered "abuse of power" then maybe that product represents too much of the market.
It'd be a lot safer of them to just ban the behavior though and create a rule.
There's no objective ranking. Every algorithm change is effectively Google's decision against someone's site.
Google has been caught abusing this responsibility with preferential treatment of AMP pages, due to AMP giving preferential treatment to Google's ads. Google knows Pinterest is blatantly spamming search, so they must have a reason for keeping them.
I basically ignore any Pinterest links because they’re just shoe pages and a login trap driven by mindlessly chasing engagement metrics.
It’s Experts Exchange that was wiped out by Stack Overflow.
The costs of this should be low. If YouTube can host videos basically for free and without forcing you to login, Pinterest can host a free links and images.
Make your site easy to use and a C pleasure to use and you build long term loyalty, behavior and engagement. The way they’re doing it screams of bad product management where engagement inevitably drops and any number of external factors will be blamed. Google downranking, competition, Facebook/Instagram, whatever. Never any internal failure.
Basically the Yelp playbook for the last decade.
Newspaper site results are similarly useless: click on search result, get "this article is for subscribers only."
Statista, for example, invaded in SERP with non attributed (without pay) data from open sources.
Meantime data open sources findability, like World Bank, getting worse every year because the don't care about Google
And Google don't care about better results
But Statista care about money. So...
little addendum: total domination Google Search on market (91,7% by Statcounter) is a cause for not spending too much money on search quality
Web Search — very expensive product. If you have market share 90%+ you have not motivation to spend more money on quality. But you have direct reasons (shareholders) to spend less money on quality.
Way of life, neh.
But who owns that market? Google.
Fortunately however - depending on the license - you can trivially download various sizes of images (including "original") with a click, using Flickr's context menu to choose between the image sizes. That seems like a reasonable approach.
I remember being able to use Google search and you could actually choose to see the image rather than navigate to the site.
Pinterest goes out of their way to make this operation annoying.