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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

"increased relevancy" -- I have always perceived it as spamming Google Image Search into unusefulness. There has rarely been a site which I've come to hate as much as Pinterest. Even if you decide to click on an image hosted on Pinterest and land on that page, the user experience is beyond abysmal.

I really wish Google had a settings options checkbox labelled "Remove Pinterest results".

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You can append -pinterest to any search. That works well enough usually.

What happens when there are, say, 100 such sites spamming SEO and polluting 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.

Google should frankly just quit indexing Pinterest until Pinterest rejoins the open web. That goes for any registration-mandatory or paywalled site. Looking at you, Medium.

That’s an interesting perspective but I don’t think it’s well calibrated for the modern web.

Why? Pinterest is basically a (human curated) image scraper. Most if not all images it hosts can be found on the open web. If Google blocked Pinterest the exact same images could still be found from their original locations. It's like Google image search indexing Bing image search.

Now Medium is a different story as the content is mostly original.

I was responding specifically to the notion that Google should block all paywall or signup gated sites.

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.

I am not minimizing the value Pinterest adds, but my personal experience is that the signal/noise ratio is not as high as you think it is. I'm not convinced that the metadata provided by Pinterest users is worth the inconvenience.

I'd settle with Google marking any link to a paywalled site (including news articles behind a paywall) as an ad.

I don’t think you’d be very satisfied with your remaining search results.

Hyperbole aside, can you describe specifically what about the user experience you find abysmal?

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