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.
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.
> What was Google's incentive for engaging with Pinterest?
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.
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”
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.