Sure, just as any other site is.

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.