It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the block list. The existence of it is genuinely mind boggling in a way that’s similar to face tattoos or Toddlers and Tiaras. Why would anyone want that to exist? At all? What is wrong with humanity?
Pinterest is a successful product that provides value to its users (I'm not the target market and I guess most of us aren't either, but there is a segment of people that do get value out of it). I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search. I'm sure they don't mind the free SEO but I don't believe there is an explicit effort to mislead search engine crawlers (especially considering other engines correctly ignore such pages).
The problem is that their pages unintentionally trigger a flaw in Google's crawler (it's unable to detect that the content is actually obscured by a JS-based login wall) and Google is unwilling to implement an override because this spam contributes to their bottom-line (increases "engagement" on the search results page).
> I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search…
And
> The problem is that their pages exploit a flaw in Google's crawler…
Don’t seem to be statements that really make any consistent sense.
It’s like if you ordered soup and instead got a bowl of human shit, a thousand times, and then felt compelled to explain that nobody wants you to eat shit, it’s just that bowls are a really convenient place to shit in.
Pages are primarily written for display & human consumption. Whatever was left of the "semantic HTML" went out the window when everyone switched to the JS SPA fad.
As far as I know there is no "right" way to design a JS SPA overlay/loginwall in a way that search engines ignore it - it's not like Pinterest is intentionally ignoring a spec or designing a page that misleads search engine crawlers (other engines seem to handle Pinterest just fine). Outright denying access to search engines could be wrong because logged-in Pinterest users may actually want those results, so that's not a good solution either.
The fault is ultimately on Google for ignoring this high-profile issue for such a long time because it contributes to their bottom-line, even though a very simple, low-tech fix (easier than making the crawler recognize such loginwalls reliably) could be to just allow users to make their own decision as to whether to block the domain, like Kagi has done.
> it's not like Pinterest is intentionally ignoring a spec or designing a page that misleads search engine crawlers
And
> The problem is that their pages exploit a flaw in Google's crawler…
I apparently misunderstood your phrasing of “exploit” to mean something intentional. You submit that Pinterest is unintentionally exploiting a flaw in a way that both drives traffic to them and ruins search.
I suppose in my shit soup analogy, the thing you’d explain is that there’s shit in the bowl because the laws of physics coincidentally allow shit to rest in a bowl.
The thing about Pinterest is that it seems to be offering something that it never delivers. A few years ago I was doing an image search and I was like, fine, I’ll sign up, I just want to see this image I’m looking for so I went through the whole process and they still wouldn’t show me the image I wanted to see. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re trying to run forward but you’re not getting anywhere? That’s Pinterest, at least in my experience.
Reminds me of the Warez sites around 1995 - 2000. Searching for "Photoshop 5 crack" or similar would lead you to a web site that would ask you to click on another link which would open a dozen popup windows. Many of those popups would also purport to have what you were looking for - just click on this link here (which opens a load of further popups).
Teenage me spent too much time wading through these pages. To this day, I'm not sure whether any of these sites really had warez or whether they were just a huge clickbait mazes.
Exploit is likely the wrong word as it isn't Pinterest doing something shady. It is more of a Google flaw and I'm sure Google sees it for what it is and hence they don't de-rank a site for doing nothing wrong.
But yes, they could fix it. However if it keeps you searching maybe they don't want to.
> Exploit is likely the wrong word as it isn't Pinterest doing something shady. It is more of a Google flaw and I'm sure Google sees it for what it is and hence they don't de-rank a site for doing nothing wrong.
I don't think argument takes exploit off the table. It just doesn't address it. Same thing for Pinterest's shady behavior.
I'm making an implication about the release of private details in a public forum. Whether the public sees it as good or bad depends on the forum. eg:Pics of their home is bad on social media, good in an expose.
I think it's because we realize that outcome should not be the only thing we value. Intent can heavily impact the benevolence of something.
I'm a bit confused why you felt the need to make that point. Are you saying you think documentaries are a basic privacy violation? What about journalism in general?
I don’t think waronprivacy knows what exposé means in this context. Rather than addressing the very obvious implication that you meant a description of how a publicly traded company creates policy they found opportunity to talk about posting pictures of people’s homes online. I’m assuming they would’ve brought this up if you’d posted any other triggering key words like “newspaper” or “journalism”
It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most useless website in their web search.
There's no reason to believe those smartest engineers' incentives are to give you good search results. If this was a technical problem this would be solved long ago by a simple "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()".
The problem is that the company employing those engineers is acting maliciously and benefits from you wasting your time with irrelevant/unusable search results as it contributes to "engagement" on the search results page and makes the sponsored results (aka spam) more likely to be clicked (even if by accident). They can get away with it since (besides Kagi) the competition is no better due to having the exact same business model.
Incentives surely play a massive role but it certainly is a technical problem. Pinterest must be showing up in Kagi's search in order for it to be so high up in the block list rankings. Do they share Google's incentives? The technical problem is deciding what is relevant when you have the entire world working towards gaming your search algorithm to appear at the top of the results. This makes it a cat and mouse game, and playing whack-a-mole by doing things like "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()", isn't scalable.
No and that's why they are offering the ability to tweak per-domain ranking per user, along with a leaderboard of most-blocked domains so people can easily find and block problematic domains.
The issue with blocking Pinterest by default is that people who use Pinterest might actually want those results, so that's not a good default.
