
Ask HN: Googlers on HN, Why Does GOOG Let Pinterest, Quora and Yelp Ruin Search? - hodder
Title says it all. Why does Google continue to let Pinterest dominate search results on Google images? Similarly, why does Google allow Yelp and Quora dominate search results while heavily penalizing almost all other results which are behind pay&#x2F;sign in walls? Further, Google seems to have decimated forum results (unless you append &quot;forum&quot; or &quot;reddit&quot; to your search), but how do forum results differ from Quora, Pinterest, and Yelp, which are crowdsourced, user generated content?
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dylz
Pinterest absolutely should be completely deindexed everywhere.

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justaguyhere
I've never used it, can you explain why you don't like them?

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dylz
It's basically a spam blog that hijacks inbound referrers from search engines
to throw up full page sign in screens and nothing else.

The vast majority of it is effectively stolen and rehosted content.

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jtloong
Is it that much different than Redditors rehosting images on Reddit/Imgur? I
find the functional design of the site terrible but there's tons of popular
sites that are based on hijacked content.

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dylz
Imgur is (IMO) turning into the same thing. Banning direct links, forcefully
redirecting direct linked images to their ad packed pages of mostly stolen
content.

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maps7
Being so popular and serving images directly seems like a path to losing money

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AftHurrahWinch
Hah! Indeed. I add -quora -pinterest -yelp to my searches by default, and it
often reduces my results by 60% or more (for the better, in my opinion).

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rajacombinator
Of all the offenders in bad search quality these are hardly the worst
offenders. The throwaway SEO’d affiliate blogspam and factory produced Medium
articles are much worse.

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notahacker
Say what you like about blogspam, but at least you generally get to the awful
content you click on, rather than being greeted by a signup process that will
leave you with little chance of finding the image Pinterest served Googlebot
even if you complete it.

Plus penalising a single domain whose growth strategy is based on flagrantly
violating Google's guidelines with deceptive search results ought to be a lot
easier than playing whack-a-mole with SEOers.

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rajacombinator
Ok that’s fair. Bait n switching gated content is BS.

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maps7
It's like googlers don't dogfood their own product.. but they obviously must
since I doubt they use any other search engine.

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seattle_spring
Google's algorithm actively promotes shitty content. Want proof? Go search for
a tuna salad recipe.

