Frankly I'd love Google to turn Google Images into much more of a true Pinterest competitor. Image search volume is pretty large, and they are already testing monetizing it. Now they just need to add in features that let you store and organize that information (and build a better profile of you in the process while also crowdsourcing tagging).

Pinterest needs more competition.

> X needs more competition.

In the context of Google being the alternative, this is sad and funny at the same time.

Hacker News in the abstract: The web needs more decentralization.

Hacker News IRL: Let Google own every vertical.

I certainly recognize the irony of suggesting that Google might help improve competition.

That said, there aren't many players in a position to provide actual competition to Pinterest like Google can. The obvious concern is where you draw the line at anti-competitive if Google tried to do the equivalent of what they did with Yelp ratings.

If they did that I would switch to Bing's image search immediately. Definitely not what I want when I'm searching for an image.

Bing is a lot better than Google for searching images. It also has better tools built in to the results page (similar images, different sizes, multiple source pages).