Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?

Re:Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search re... by visarga on Saturday December 26, 2020 @01:02AM (#25541754)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search re... by cft on Saturday December 26, 2020 @01:07AM (#25541771)

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...

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Re:Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search re... by visarga on Saturday December 26, 2020 @01:27AM (#25541841)

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.

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