Hacker News Reader

Comment by andersrs | Hacker News Reader

And then they take that $2M and bribe someone at Google to ensure 59% of the image search results are from Pinterest.

I'm really surprised Google Images doesn't block Pinterest.

Google are returning results for image search without the overhead cost. This is the only logical reason I can think of why Pinterest still exists.

I was never sure where all the hate is coming from. Pinterest is actually one of my favourite apps, that I use regularly – and I use very few apps. I actually really love it and after years I still find new uses for it. As far as I can tell, they have a pretty loyal user base.

The hate stems from Pinterest requiring an account, which they didn't start out requiring, just like Instagram which I also don't visit.

An account is not required anymore.

The hate comes from them hiding where the original content is from. They hijack search results and then pull you into an endless circle of harvested content, making it difficult to find the link to the original source of the material.

this is not true? every single pin has a big button underneath which takes you to the original webpage where it was saved from. and if it was manually uploaded by the user and lacks this kind of metadata, you can scan it visually and it shows you all the other uploads on pinterest which match it approximately, and usually one of the matches has better metadata.

this has been inconsistent over the years. maybe they 'fixed' it but it wasn't not the case before. they were extremely parasitical. you'd click the button and it would just take you to more pins

that only happens when the image was manually uploaded by a user (i.e from gallery). there's not much they can do about it. in that case you can scan it to find visual matches and hopefully one of them has metadata about the original source (but it's not perfect and you have to scroll a bit).

I'll take your word for it, you're welcome to it, but I'd rather it just didn't show up so high in search results.

Oh, and if it could stop recommending pro-anorexic content to my teenager, I'd like that to. It's banned on the LAN but I can't enforce that elsewhere.

It's a dumpster fire of SEO dark patterns and unmoderated shitty content and shouldn't be ranked so high in searches. Google should have routed around them years ago.

> I was never sure where all the hate is coming from. Pinterest is actually one of my favourite apps, that I use regularly – and I use very few apps.

I'm not looking for an _app_ when searching in google, I'm looking for a link to a _web site_ with original image.

google search is worthless now, not just for images. i only ever use it with the `site:` setting or the research subsomain (these are rhe only ones that seem to have retained a functional version of google's algorithm). i use pinterest itself for general image discoverability and it works really well.

It'd be fine if it wouldn't spam google images results, and resulting images are often completely cut out of context, or origin link is not working.

if the origin link isn't working, that means it was taken offline by the original source. in that case, imo it's a good thing that at least the image was archived on their servers. especially since each one has a comments section where someone might post information about it.

It earns them money, and people aren't using competitors; Google has seemed to give up on the quality of results a long time ago in favor of plain volume and whatever numbers they use to measure success.

Is this based on something or just a random conspiracy?

79% of statistics are made up.

Yes it's a joke... just like Google's results in 2023.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com