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Comment by titaphraz | Hacker News Reader

Pintrest owns all the top 7 blocked results. Good, they've earned it.

I never understood why Google let them destroy Google Image search results.

Apparently Pinterest has half a billion users[1], presumably significant number of those appreciate those search results. I am also going to guess that there is little overlap between those 500M users with HN's 5M users[2] or Kagi's 43K users[3].

So while those results-gated-behind-logins might seem annoying to us, we are in the minority.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/463353/pinterest-global-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140

[3] https://kagi.com/stats

Man I hate to say you're completely right, but you're completely right.

I remember years back being in some social thing where someone was railing on social media and pontificated "absolutely noone wants what Facebook is", and I grudgingly had to retort "you don't want Facebook, but a half a billion people (at the time) obviously do".

Read the room.

Many of us are reluctant users. There because our friends our communities are. I would love FB to go away.

I am the admin of two FB groups, both UK home education related (one about exams and qualifications, the other for single parents). I do it because I feel I should help the community (especially as the crappy commercial groups that target the same audience), which is made up of non-technically inclined, mostly middle aged women - i.e. FB's core demographic. I cannot remember the other demographic nos offhand, but its 95% women in the exams group, and 98% in the other (and both have 1% other/did not say), and the age profile reflects the fact that people have school age (or just over, in the 16 to 18 age group) children.

I had actually planned to try and push the community towards forums, but with the Online Safety Act in force that is not a risk I am inclined to take.

My cousin runs a family group where she shares photos and wishes people happy birthday. I would prefer her to use WhatsApp but she is the one running it.

A lot of my friends post family news, important things like births and deaths and weddings on FB.

Many of us are reluctant users.

I understand what you're saying, but my own observation is "many of us" == "a tiny minority". "There because our friends our communities are" is exactly it...our friends and communities don't care as long as FB and the other social media cesspools are the default. I too have tried to get various relations to not make me log into social media to be part of their life, and I get some variation of "oh, you weird little infosec guy, that's way too much work and it's good enough for all of us".

I like Pinterest a lot.

I find art, tattoo ideas, home decor, concrete/wood builds, clothing fits, wedding themes…

It’s like a one-stop-shop when you need some fresh ideas on design.

It also has a ludicrously smooth and fast UX and makes it possible to access the high resolution original photographs (up to 100+ megapixels) by modifying url parameters.

I use Pinterest a ton. What param can I use to extract the original res?

Images are served from i.pinimg.com/ and the url params can be changed from "[0-9]+x(\/[0-9a-f]{2}){3}\/[0-9a-f]{32}\.jpg" to "originals/(\/[0-9a-f]{2}){3}\/[0-9a-f]{32}\.(jpg|png)".

Awesome, thank you.

I remember a few years before Pinterest’s IPO, there were random statistics flowing around about how unique of a demographic Pinterest had compared to the rest of the internet. It’s mostly female dominated compared to the rest of the male dominated internet. Not just any female demographic either, but upper middle class, high income, young women †. There was simply no other online service that had that as its main demographic to the degree that Pinterest did. I remember thinking that must be a really attractive target for online advertisers and maybe I should keep an eye out for the IPO. Luckily I forgot. Its stock has been mostly lackluster.

†: hell son that was during my dating years. I was going on a lot of dates with women specifically in that demographic. Once I got to know a woman I would research her on google while narrowing my search to Pinterest. Out of 20 or so women I recall there were only 2 that didn’t have Pinterest accounts. The rest had, very active, Pinterest accounts.

Interesting. I didn't even know pinterest is a legitimate site. I just assumed it is som SEO scam from looking at the website for a few seconds.

Try it, you may like it. I use it for collaborative visual brainstorming with real life projects (e.g. fashion or photo ideas) and it works well for that purpose.

It's a great tool for finding inspiration and creating moodboards.

Tangentally, IIRC the setting for the next Elder Scrolls game was all but confirmed after some creative at Bethesda accidentally made public a Pinterest collection with weapons and armor from the medieval arab world.

It's actually a fantastic site. I use it for bookmarking images every day for future projects.

I'm surprised - simply because I never get Pinterest results on Google. Now admittedly most of my searches aren't the kind where Pinterest is likely to have relevant results, but even then, surely I'd at least see them _sometimes_. But I literally can't remember the last time I saw a Pinterest search result.

Unless, as you suggest, they take over Google Images but not text search results? I could believe that I use Image search sufficiently rarely that I wouldn't have seen a Pinterest result.

I only get Pinterest results when I'm searching for something generic enough, and in those cases, why not use an image from Pinterest. I don't really understand the hate.

It's a nightmare for finding the original sources of images. For example, I was looking for a new sink basin and doing some quick image searches for various styles.

All the ones I liked were pinterest posts with zero attribution. A reverse image search then just brings up dozens of ripped and reposted copies of that pinterest post, also without attribution.

It gets frustrating

I assume with the 'popularity' bias (probably not the right phrase) in the modern internet this is pretty much the future of search. Someone comes up with something cool, posts a pix, and someone else puts it on Twit/Face/Tube/whatever and it gets reposted over and over and over and since the original is some worthless peon as far as the algorithm is concerned you'll never, ever find them.

I wonder if that's something that can be addressed by embedding the right metadata into images/videos? Most people don't bother even checking e.g. Exif data (let alone stripping or otherwise altering it) when reposting content they find online.

Pinterest kills meta and exif of all uploads.

Well fuck them and the horse they rode in on, then.

usually that's a good thing for privacy

I can't speak for every platform but when I was working with frequent photo posts, most in-camera or post-editing metadata was stripped out on instagram and facebook. Some smaller sites like Gab didn't seem to mess with it as much, but the bulk did. I wouldn't be surprised if all of the other big ones did, too.

It was incredibly disheartening to have no recourse to attribute my own work, other than to smear some gross watermark on it. The automatic removal of that metadata, along with AI image generation, are some of the reasons why I gave up on the hobby entirely.

It's incredibly hard and stressful to derive any sort of pleasure or interest from something when the second it's exposed to the internet, any sense of humanity you tried to attach to it is stripped away, burned, and commercialized for the monetary benefit of some ethereal financier. It's the sound of an invisible vacuum cleaner, whisking away any sense of joy or life you wanted to share with the world for common love; the death of sharing. For-pay hugs.

From my experience it’s only because many times the original copy is gone. Without Pinterest, you wouldn’t even find it anymore.

Because Pinterest doesn't let you see anything without making an account and logging in.

And even if you are logged in, good chances you get redirected to some other useless page rather than the image you were trying to view. Or if you're not logged in, by the time you do get logged back in, you lose the original link and you're dumped on a random feed.

Pinterest is always a dead end for me. I don't have an account, so I can't actually access anything that the link is taking me to. It's a giant turd in my search results.

The hate is because Pinterest is shallow but shows when folk are searching for depth. The engine can't tell and these results are tricksy and false.

Mostly because if you try and visit the page that the image was supposedly on, it won't actually be there.

All of those top domains (of which the majority are pinterest) have more than earned it.

I'm one of the minority that loves Pinterest. Happy to have them in my results, honestly. A lot of times they are the only remaining source for a specific image that has faded from the rest of the Internet.

When I've been reverse-image searching for obscure things, sometimes it's been the only result (despite not being the original source). I'd rather see pinterest than nothing - but I suppose you can fix that with downranking rather than banning them outright.

Compared to the AI slop flooding image search results, pinterest is increasingly looking "better than the alternatives".

Because they sued.

Did Pinterest sue Google? Do you have a link for that?

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