Google should be asking from a product perspective if they are providing the search results the user is most likely seeking.

I seriously doubt that most pinterest results are what users are seeking. As such, Google probably should consider changes to their algorithm to compensate (cat and mouse) for pinterest's gaming. That is assuming how pinterest does it is not against any google rules... because if it were against any rules, they should be slapped down hard.

When my searches result in mostly pinterest results, I give up more quickly. That means I spend less time using google, and that in theory means less money for google. Unfortunately, I do see other more regular user types operate their computers, and they are less or un-descriminating about the domain name listed under the image. So they'll head directly into the pinterest waste pond anyway.

Yeah, Pinterest is almost always disappointing as a result: their account requirements are annoying and it tends to obfuscate the source of the image or information you’re looking for.

A few times I've landed on Pinterest and they lock user copied (contrary to copyright law in my country AFAICT) content behind a registration-wall. They never show enough utility for new to register, they just tease on Google and then don't show what they teased.

Google results would be better for me with all Pinterest results removed.

Wasn’t there an option at one time to tell Google to hide results from a certain domain? I feel like I haven’t seen that in years though

It still works

-site:pinterest.*

Even with wildcard tld, otherwise it is still all Pinterest

But it is interesting that those kind of Google/search engine feature hardly ever get talked about these days whereas in the past they were considered crucial to get decent results.

I don't know what the pathway for this is but just -pinterest does it for me.

-pinterest removes pages that contain the term pinterest, so pages from a pinterest.* domain, plus articles about pinterest, etc.

Sounds pretty good to me. If I'm searching for a term, but don't want results from pintrest, then I'm probably not wanting to read an article about pintrest either.

"Here's a picture I took today. I also posted it on Instagram and Pintrest."

Except that the word "pinterest", like pinterest.* results, appears in all the nooks and crannies of the rest of the Web. Excluding the domain like that succeeds in narrowing the scope of the search without excluding content unduly.

If you wanted to read an article about Pinterest, it would probably be hard to search for it in any other way.

I use that a lot. Wouldn't Google notice if a lot of people were telling it they don't want to see results from Pinterest and make some adjustments to their SERPs?

That's a nice hack, thanks! I've just modified my Google search engine entry in Chrome to include this.

There use to be an easy way to configure your account to always block certain domains, but that's gone now, so you have to use -site per-query. Maybe there are browser plugins that help? I miss the old functionality. I only had to block about a dozen sites to get great search results. Maybe it'd be less viable now; I'd probably have to block hundreds or thousands of sites, and they'd keep breeding new ones.

Just make a search that excludes all the domains you despise. Don't include any search terms or just a dummy one.

Then save it as a bookmark.

e.g.

  "-site:foo.* -site:bar.* ..."

Use that bookmark as your search engine: click on it, then fill in search terms.

You used to be able to tweak part of the URL in the Firefox google search thing, and append queries I thought so as well.

Yep. Google removed it.

https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/issues/674

You can hide sites with a flag in the query. No idea if it works on image search but I assume it does.

    -site:pinterest.com

Just add `-site:example.org` to your query.

I have done this throughout COVID for the NYTimes' content, as it's behind a paywall.

Interestingly, if you use Brave, it lets you hop to the tor versions of sites, and since NYTimes has a tor version, if you visit that, it’s paywall free.

I use Brave. How do I hop to the Tor version of a site?

If you go to a site that advertises (via HTTP header) that it has a Tor version, you'll get an "Open in Tor" button at the end of the address bar.

Examples are nytimes.com and dw.com

It was too effective.

I don't get why Google doesn't give an option to permanently remove or downgrade certain domains, straight from the results page. There are results I am never interested in. It could also work as a further signal for their ranking, if used with some caution.

Probably Google would do good to give up total control and obscurity and put people in the driving seat of search customization. Maybe that would even save them from the anti-trust push (one indexing and retrieval back end + multiple ranking, filtering and UI front ends).

But I'm wondering if this would not be better implemented at browser level. Can we have the white/black list run locally in the browser, re-ranking results on web pages and hiding what we don't want to see? Not just on Google, but also on the rest of the web, like ad blocking extensions.

I have an account there and I use it but the interface is atrocious and they seem to actively be making it worse.

Recently they removed the facility to, when saving a pin, to type the name of the board to find it, now having to scroll through an alphabetical listing.

Before that, they also redesigned the website such that a refresh of the page was required in order to save a pin to two different boards, an action they explicitly support.

The website is also a slow resource hog.

Of course, it comes with the tried and tested “corporate morality” where there are rules against various things that are phrased in terms of moral concerns that are really about keeping their app on the Apple store — this naturally includes vague standards on “nudity” that are not worded in a gendered way, but there is an unofficial code that everyone knows that it very much is.

The most annoying moral preaching I encountered was that I searched for “boy's love” once — the genre of male–male tragic romantic fiction, that got me a preachy message about pædophilia that made me suspect my i.p. address was probably passed on to some U.S.A. authorities. It's really quite a big genre and has nothing to do with pædophilia.

They only recently added a way to search one's own's pins, and it's very lacking and doesn't reliably even catch words in the descriptions thereof. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn't.

What can be said about it is that the algorithm for finding related things is generally quite good — the interesting thing is that it's actually better at finding the aforementioned boy's love fiction than most of the websites that actually host it.

The problem is that there is no real competitor.

> I have an account there and I use it but the interface is atrocious and they seem to actively be making it worse.

If the user is confused on how to do something then it keeps them on the page longer and pushes the metrics up

taps on head

The irritating part is that Google used to penalize websites dramatically if the user couldn't get to the content but the search engine could.

I guess that interfered with Google extracting ad money.

Yes, Ointerest and Quora are types of site that Google should really punish hard. Account requirements is something that should move sites outside the few top pages...

Yeah, the results should definitely contain a HEAVY waiting for accessibility by the general user and most people don't have a pinterest account nor do they want one.

The absolute worst part of pinterest is the the time it takes to respond to ctl-w. It's slower than just about every other site.

With Google featuring progressively more ads and Google content at the top of the results page, it's not clear if it's still in Google's self interest to give users the best results anymore.

This is why there's an aggressive firewall between the ads and search organizations. The ranking team isn't even aware of revenue numbers by ACL.

I'm sure the search team can, erm,google for the ad revenue figures in the earnings release.

After reading the anti trust filing it’s hard to argue Google is anything else but evil and a lot of what it does is to hide its monopoly.

Apropos of anything else, Google is famous for a "monorepo". Any team can see the underlying architecture of things, regardless of any supposed "aggressive firewall" alluded to above.

A monorepo does not let you deduce the revenue consequences of experiments, but regardless, even if you could figure it out, it isn't part of the incentive structure.

You think the search team runs an experiment once per 3 months to test how their algorithm ideas impact earnings?

The company isn't a charity. If a search change demonstrably has a negative effect on company earnings (even if users like it) it will almost certainly be reversed. I don't think they run an experiment once every three months, I think they are testing continuously, including A/B testing (some users get the change, others don't,).

> If a search change demonstrably has a negative effect on company earnings (even if users like it) it will almost certainly be reversed.

This is completely false. I've personally been involved in launching ranking changes that negatively impacted revenue substantially. I didn't find out until months later through the grapevine, and only in vague terms like "ads had to scramble." Versions of them remain in production today. Revenue projections were never considered as part of the launch decision, nor have they they been consulted as part of evaluating subsequent versions.

Perhaps this has gone too far, as others have noted, there are so many ads and Google generated content (esp. YouTube links) that the organic search results are practically on the second page.

If Googlers were allowed to consider revenue in the search results perhaps they wouldn't have been so easily down graded to a second class citizen.

You can find public examples where the opposite has been done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda

> In 2016, Matt Cutts, Google's head of webspam at the time of the Panda update, commented that "with Panda, Google took a big enough revenue hit via some partners that Google actually needed to disclose Panda as a material impact on an earnings call. But I believe it was the right decision to launch Panda, both for the long-term trust of our users and for a better ecosystem for publishers."

Disclosure I work at Google.

I doubt the ad organization and ranking teams decide where and how many sponsored listings appear in search results, which I believe is GP's point: the page design/layout and the proportions of ads vs. (more or less) organic listings. Someone decides that searches have e.g. four ads at the top and two at the bottom.

I’m... skeptical about this firewall

If you believe this I would love to sell you an extremely expensive bridge.

If ever.

Well to be fair, probably the engineers want to on some level, but there is a business mandate to not (and there always has been).

Yeah, it’s honestly time for a new search experience

>Google should be asking from a product perspective if they are providing the search results the user is most likely seeking.

I am cynical. Maybe Google's own experiments show that users click more ads when they get frustrated of the Pinterest spam that is technically not spam enough to be removed from the index.

What the users are going to do? Use Bing?

Google's most optimised version is probably being an Ads search engine where you are presented only with the most lucrative ads that are relative to your query. Essentially Yellow pages.

>What the users are going to do? Use Bing?

duckduckgo isn't horrific. And certainly not for image searches, which is how Pinterest's pollution ends up being noticed.

I had an experience the other day where duckduckgo worked where google had failed (an obscure java default bug). It was pleasantly surprising.

It's certainly going in that direction. With reverse image search being replaced with "Search with Google Lense" on mobile, the most prominent results are now all Google shopping ads.

If that's the idea, isn't it easier to just show random junk? Why pinterest?

> I seriously doubt that most pinterest results are what users are seeking.

Well, yeah, since even if you click through Pinterest won't actually show you the content.

Isn't that supposed to disqualify them from appearing in search results at all?

Just do -pinterest in your search to filter

User: This service has a problem and it's not working well.

Programmer: There's nothing wrong with the service, you just have to use [magic incantation] to make it work right.

I've been hoping for 20 years that this kind of exchange would stop happening. Still hoping! :-)

And there's always this kind of response. They didn't say the service was fine, they just provided a simple workaround which doesn't require forcing a change to Google's algorithm. Hoping they don't help with this seems odd.

So, to counter, I'm glad that they did say this as it regularly annoys me too.

It's indeed a useful tip - and no offense to the GP - but this kind of reply always feels like the tech support equivalent of a mandatory arbitration clause: like an attempt to solve an issue individually with each person reporting it instead of giving a systemic solution that would benefit anyone. The blame is shifted from devs providing a good service to individual users not knowing the latest workaround.

Most probably the devs know how to do it but specs written by someone else told them to obfuscate useful functionality.

Google: we need your personal information so we can improve your experience

User: -pinterest

Google: we need your personal information so we can improve your experience

User: -pinterest!!

et cetera, ad infinitum ...

But no one said that there’s nothing wrong with the service. They merely offered a very simple workaround. I can’t imagine why you’d hope for that to stop happening.

Why? This is a quick fix. Maybe the problem will get fixed "officially" someday. But I have the problem now, I need a workaround now, not in 5 years.

User: your thing doesn't work the specific way I want. I haven't read the manual and refuse to learn now to use its features. You should make it magically work the way I imagine.

Multiply by 100 users with different opinions, all entitled, on how thing should work.

Services and users have different goals. Why is the helpful technologist the problem?

Real answer?

Because helpful technologists are the interface between less knowledgeable users and services like Google. We’re the power users and “mavens” who are both highly exposed to the product and have some understanding of what’s going wrong and how it might be made better. We also spend a lot more time talking to that product’s engineering staff than the typical user (see e.g. the fact that we’re here on HN.)

When helpful technologists opt out of the problematic aspects of a product by uttering some magic incantation, we essentially remove ourselves from having to be annoyed by the product’s rough edges. This means we’re less likely to help improve the service for everyone, and we’re probably more likely to incorporate similar carelessness into the things we make ourselves.

How could a technologist, who's not in charge of the $BigTech be able to fix the problem? They can't. So, they offer the user a work-around. Then, the user never complains to $BigCo because of the Help and still nothing gets done. And later, we complain that we're not fixing $BigCo and we're all mad at "the help".

How, really, could you improve the Google service for everyone?

How many Google Search* engineers saw this article on HN? I guarantee the number is greater than zero.

* Or people who talk to Search engineers regularly, etc.

Acausal decision theory, given the assumption that you have the same decision-making algorithm as the technologists in charge of $BigTech. (The assumption's completely invalid, so it doesn't actually work.)

I see your point. Working around abusive behaviour, and accepting that as a solution, just enables further abuse. I don't think we can influence said engineers here on HN. I know for a fact that I personally wouldn't be influenced, and I also think that if the product managers will want something, then it will get done, no matter what people write here.

Your second statement is enabling bad behavior, your first statement is insane.

No. They're exactly right. The root problem here is incentive misalignment. Both Google and Pinterest sacrifice value they provide to extract more revenue from their users.

Care to elaborate on the insane part? I feel sane.

"Programmer" here is wrong. Because we are all user of the product "google search".

But yes I see your point. I call it the "permanent workaround"

I think your premise is wrong. The service isn't broken. I'd assume Google has enough people and data to know that it's doing what most people want. They were even kind enough to put in a workaround for the minority for whom it doesn't work well (which appears to be OP).

Most people want to have a full result page of nothing but login walls when searching for any kind of image?

Most people who click on Pinterest links are already logged into Pinterest...

There’s no way that’s true. I’d be surprised if even 1% of the Google users paid attention to the source site underneath the image.

And you’d think people with a Pinterest account would opt to search on their website/app rather than going through Google (thus making it even more unlikely that the Google user has a Pinterest account).

Pinterest has a huge user base. They don't need to look at the source if they have an account; the link will work fine.

And, no, most people don't bother picking a site before searching. Why would they artificially limit their results? People don't even visit amazon before searching for Amazon products.

Pinterest’s user-base is surely minuscule compared to the amount of users using Google Image Search.

I’m not saying that 100% of all users with a Pinterest account use their website/app, but many of them will of course opt to use Pinterest’s website/app for their image searches, which means an even smaller percentage of the Google Image Search users will have a Pinterest account.

Not just Image Search - Pinterest often dominates Text Search, and people here are "Oh well, they figured out how to deliver what Google wants!"

But not most people doing a Google search. Anyone who is not on Pinterest has its result page spammed with useless links.

For the amount of people hired you would assume they had the best people.

But their hiring process is broken. They randomly hire a % of people who pass an algorithm test. It's so random that 70% of their workforce wouldn't be hired again if they had to go through that process.

The brand is so strong that people think anyone who makes it into google must be the best of the best. It's more like a random person who has studied leetcode.

Google account preferences used to have an option to exclude domains from results. About a decade (?) ago I added Burleson Consulting and expertsexchange to blocked domains and Google was instantly useful again. In 2014-ish Google moved this functionality to Chrome so I lost access to it. Not sure if it is still there.

It's not perfect, but I use the Firefox version of this extension. Good for blocking Pinterest and those techno-babble scraper sites.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

It would be great if Google had a little "hide this domain for me permanently" next to every search result. Not only would it improve that user's own search results, it's a very strong signal that other users also might not like it, for de-ranking purposes.

They used to offer that functionality but removed it years ago.

I've been using this userscript since then. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...

It might be called Google Hit Hider by Domain but the author has expanded it to cover most major search engines over the years.

I've used a similar script; the problem is, for certain searches, literally every result is a pinterest link, and you end up with a blank page.

I just wanted to mention that excluding strings has been broken for me off-and-on over the last month at least.

Not directly relevant to anything except how lame google has become.

Only a month? I don't recall the last time it actually worked. I always end up having to do -"string" and put it in quotation marks, kind of like telling Google "why, yes, this thing I put that minus sign in front of really is something I don't want to see in my results."

Clearly we should not have no include -fakenews -porn, etc, otherwise I might as well use bing / Duckduckgo/ whatever

-site:pinterest.* (there's supposed to be an asterisk at the end, but I have to type something after the asterisk for it to show up)

It gets tiring.

Thank you, but still, the regular person is not finding what they seek, but what SEO experts want them to find.

Or just avoid using google. The Pinterest results in google image search queries was a major driver to me using bing/ duck duck go.

Linking directly to the image file (and in fact a cached version of the full image) is one of the best reasons to use DDG.

Reverse image search is also intentionally gimped, unlike non-US jurisdiction Yandex which is quite good.

It's certainly for legal reasons, not technical, but Image Search has gotten progressively worse every year. It used to be godly effective 10 years ago.

> Linking directly to the image file (and in fact a cached version of the full image) is one of the best reasons to use DDG.

That’s possible thanks to Microsoft’s Bing API. I’m surprised Getty (who’s afaik responsible for Google removing direct image links) only went after Google and not Microsoft.

At least for image search, I use a Firefox extension called Unpinterested. I'm very happy with my search results now. Note: I had to toggle an option to make it work only for image search, because it borked other Google results.

I remember when Google added a functionality to block domains entirely from your results. They removed it soon after though; I'm guessing some big advertiser was blacklisted many times.

Both in Google, and in DDG, sometimes when I am looking for an image (i.e. image of a "full body workout plan") the images I find tend to be 'hosted' in Pinterest, but in reality following them links take me to Pinterest, and then back to the original source (which is some random fitness site).

I find Pinterest useful as an image search engine.

"That means I spend less time using google, and that in theory means less money for google."

In practice, losing customers means less money for Google. Pinterest is a large Google customer. As individual users, we are very tiny bits of a very large target, but we are not customers.

> Google should be asking from a product perspective if they are providing the search results the user is most likely seeking.

I never want Pinterest. I don't have an account. I don't want one. I will never want one.

It is basically an arms race between search engines (specifically google) and SEO. Google does change their algorithms, but with enough effort (and money) SEO proffesionals can figure out how to tweak their sites to keep gaming the system. And the casualties of this war are the authentic sites that don't spend a ton of money on SEO.

This is a little bit like: 'McDonald's should serve healthier food, like Salads'.

'What Google Wants' and 'What We Want' have reached a crude equilibrium and it's unlikely to change that much, even if there are obvious improvements to make.

Qualitative improvements beyond need generally require a very specific corporate and cultural focus. If Sergei or Larry 'came back' and mandated it, the system would move around it. Or Sundar could, maybe, pull that off, but it's not in his DNA really.

The lack of material innovation in search stopped over a decade ago.

Otherwise, we should be getting betas every few months, with all sorts of options, features, etc. Even simple things like 'forever blocking a site by default' would be great.

They are playing a cat and mouse game, only the mouse is quite determined as its bonuses depend on evading, and the cat is very fat and comfortable :).

Stop using Google search. DDG works just as well

I use DDG search most of the time, but I find this to be untrue. DDG is pretty good, but struggles with context a lot more than Google does. For example, when searching for an error in a programming library, DDG is likely to return the library homepage, whereas google is more likely to return the specific github issue where the error is being discussed.

For text it depends [1] but for images I find DDG to range from slightly to significantly better than Google. Also, I have direct access to the image file URL without having to rely on browser extensions.

[1] I wonder if the meme "DDG is not that good" is so prevalent on Hacker News because it sucks for programming stuff.

Yes, Google image searches produce wild results. Far-right groups have had a field day with it.

This used to be true. Regularly I had to use the !g bang to find what I was looking for. Lately, I've realised that I hardly use it anymore and I do results are far worse on Google. Your mileage may vary of course but I don't bother with Google anymore.

Same. I went the DDG route a couple of years ago, and searching tech topics made me constantly do g!. And a few other things. Suddenly, Google's results go so much worse, that the duckduckgo offering just proved to be actually functional by comparison. And I think it actually has improved over the years. It's now my default browser search and I'm comfortable not having to worry about Google capturing every feeling or thought I have when I google something, and storing that for eternity.

Not to mention the awful vendor blogs and stores and secretive marketing clickbait masquerading as a neutral information totally dominating Google's page 1 and 2 of results.

Agreed. I switched to DDG a few weeks ago as a default. I appreciate the privacy, but for some categories (like tech questions) the results are just... not as accurate. For general queries they're comparable. For searching specific issues, Google is more likely to show relevant discussion threads of the exact issue.

Would that this were true, but it's not. Searching for specific technical issues especially shows DDG's weakness.

Outside of searching for specific technical issues, DDG is pretty good. I use DDG for most of my searches and this is the first I've heard of search results being dominated by Pinterest, so it's at least better on that front.

That's problem, DDG works nearly exactly the same (except a bit worse imo). DDG channels a lot of Bing, which virtually clones Google which makes it not much of an alternative at all.

I’ve been using DDG as my default for years and it really fails to provide me helpful results for programming and Linux questions. I know this because I frustratingly have to add !g to queries all the time lately and I’m questioning my choice to default to DDG.

That said, I don’t like being tracked. It’s not clear to me if the quality of results I am seeing are due to Google’s tracking or not. (I suppose I could research this but I’ve not done so.)

It has improved for me to the point I don't use !g anymore. Maybe subconciously I now do queries that fit DDG better. Anyway, I get the answer I want so can now live without Google.

Instead of playing cat and mouse with Pinterest, what would be a much better idea is to let users themselves decide what's important to them. Let us vote search results up or down, and let us block sites we don't like yet keep showing up. Those two changes would do a lot to improve user experience.

I think Google collects clickthorughs on the search result page and thus knows how people react to its responses. It also knows when the user is quickly returning to search after checking out a link. Pinterest is probably appreciated by people, probably of a different demographic than you.

Here is some background on this:

Recently, it has been revealed that Pinterest reverse-image searches Google for uploaded images and adds the Google query result to the Pinterest image page for SEO: https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-...

This degrades quality of Google image search, for example this Reddit post on removing Pinterest got 77k upvotes:

Reddit r/LifeProTips to remove Pinterest from Google searches: https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/hejbl0/lpt_whe...

Earlier Reddit petition to Google to remove Pinterest from search results (66k upvotes): https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/85atho/pinterest_ne...

Hacker News discussion of Pinterest's Google scraping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701998

Earlier discussion on HackerNews (1.1k upvotes): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996

"Unpinterested" Chrome extension to combat Pinterest spam (10k+ downloads): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...

I agree, but if you take uninformed users (or users at random, that don't subscribe to a Google related forum) they would be happy with the Pinterest results because the results look nice at first sight and they don't have time to learn about the problem. Google using this signal would conclude that Pinterest is OK for the users.

I think they can't do anything about it. Regulators and lawmakers in the US and EU would be very receptive to complaints from pinterest if google were to act somehow.

Do you have references for this? I'm genuinely curious if this kind of thing is actually being done. Google's altered it's algorithm to remove low quality sites in the past and if anti-trust worries are stopping that now, well, I can't even.

If google were to downrank pinterest, it would seem very similar to the foundem case: https://www.ft.com/content/88f26f10-5d3a-11e9-939a-341f5ada9...

Google has shown time and time again they do not worry about providing the search results the user is most likely seeking. They monitor ad revenue and adjust accordingly.

Still odd that Google tolerates this. Isn't this exactly the kind of black-hat SEO that they are usually downranking or banning sites for?

Pinterest landing pages are intentionally unusable for anyone without an account. It's hard to make a good-faith argument that those pages are the "most relevant result" for someone making a simple image search.

Yep, exactly. I find that Pinterest is slowly making me less and less likely to use Google. Pinterest shows up as the dominating search result even or very specific long tail keywords where one could argue that a collection of images on a login-gated page is not helpful at all.

I don't use google for images anymore because of this.

Bing is terrible, but it's better than google.

Which means that google is worse than terrible.

Yandex is great for images these days.

> Isn't this exactly the kind of black-hat SEO that they are usually downranking or banning sites for?

How is it blackhat to do exactly what Google wants?

Using tricks at the detriment of the user to the benefit of the service is blackhat. Pinterest is doing these tricks to their benefit at the extreme detriment to everyone but themselves.

It's weird to blame Pinterest for Google's choice to promote the site. Sure Pinterest wants to rank highly, but they aren't tricking Google. Google knows how popular they choose to make Pinterest results, and how much most users like those results.

If I make an algorithm to rank sites, and you figure out the internals of that algo and manipulate your behavior to rank at the top, that's bad and not the same as being Google's choice, at least not directly.

My friend, Google tells you how this works. Pinterest doesn't have secret knowledge.

"There's no intentional or manual effort at Google to promote pinterest."

But there is an effort at Pinterest to promote itself via Google. Pinterest pays Google for online ad aservices. Pinterest is a Google customer. The user is not.

The bottom line at Google is not driven by showing users the "best" results for users. The bottom line is driven by customers such as Pinterest who pay Google to assist them with online advertising.

Page and Brin identified this conflict of interest in their 1998 paper introducing Google, which was originally intended to be an academic endeavor, not to become an online ad services company.^1 According to the authors, (a) the interests of users and advertisers are not one in the same, (b) there are inherent effects on search results if the search engine is funded by advertising, and (c) the behind-the-scenes operation ("technical details") of search engines funded by advertising become largely non-transparent to users/competitors (a "black art").

I reckon (c) is why we get questions like this one from the OP.

I have also seen these inexplicable and useless Pinterest links in Google searches.

1. https://research.google/pubs/pub334.pdf

Quotes:

"To make matters worse, some advertisers attempt to gain people's attention by taking measures meant to mislead automated search engines."

"Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm."

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."

"For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

"Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results."

"But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

The term "black art" appears to be a synonym for "black magic".

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_magic) describes black magic as "the use of supernatural powers or magic for evil and selfish purposes."^1

1. J. Gordon Melton, ed. (2001). "Black Magic". Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology. Vol 1: A-L (Fifth ed.). Gale Research Inc. ISBN 0-8103-9488-X.

Had anyone ever presented evidence that advertisers manipulate organic results? Former employees blow all sorts of whistles. Why has this one never blown?

pinterest is clearly being spared seo penalty so one can only assume pro-pinterest bias at google

What they are doing to get into google search is not the problem, the problem is all their links are scams, clicking on pinterest google images link lands you on a login screen, or on a farm of similar/adjacent images. Nowhere do they have the content you were actually looking for.

TLDR: they are gaming google

It is there— it usually just takes pages of scrolling. I heard a 2nd-hand account which said their product team leadership knows this annoys the hell out of people, know it's an easy fix, but they do it anyway. If that's true, I'd guess they're ignoring Goodhart's Law with their engagement metrics and need to re-focus on their UX, though I don't have any first-hand insight into it.

Not if you don't have Pininterest account. then you can't scroll more than half a page.

One could say they are gaming it

The Wikipedia clones gamed it and they were deranked. Why does Pinterest get special treatment?

I'm guessing because Pinterest buys ads from Google? They're the customers from Google's PoV.