I hate what Pinterest does to google image searching. Sometimes I really just want to paste an image src in an online discussion without having to drill into devtools.
How does it manage to rank so well? I'm not a user of it but whenever it appears in searches it feels like endless popups and walled content that tries to make you sign up. I would have thought Google would discourage links like this.
Once upon Pinterest was great. But now it's just atrocious and toxic. Even logged in.
It's the worst outcome for solving a problem which could be naturally aced on the web. Instead we got a cancered platform causing headaches to everyone.
I was curious how Pinterest addresses that in their S-1. Here’s how they put it:
> We depend in part on internet search engines to direct traffic and refer new users to our service. If search engines’ methodologies and policies are modified or enforced in ways we do not anticipate, or if our search results page rankings decline for other reasons, traffic to our service or user growth, retention or engagement could decline, any of which could harm our business, revenue and financial results.
> We depend in part on internet search engines, such as Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex, to direct a significant amount of traffic to our service. For example, when a user types a query into a search engine, we may receive traffic and acquire new users when those search results include Pins, boards, Pinners and other features of our service that cause the user to click on the Pinterest result or create a Pinterest account. These actions increase Pinner growth due to signups of new users and increase retention and engagement of existing Pinners.
> Our ability to maintain and increase the number of visitors directed to our service from search engines is not within our control. Search engines, such as Google, may modify their search algorithms and policies or enforce those policies in ways that are detrimental to us, that we are not able to predict or without prior notice. When that occurs, we expect to experience declines or de-indexing in the organic search ranking of certain Pinterest search results, leading to a decrease in traffic to our service, new user signups and existing user retention and engagement. We have experienced
declines in traffic and user growth as a result of these changes in the past, and anticipate fluctuations as a result of such actions in the future. For example, in the first quarter of 2018, Google de-indexed our keyword landing pages, which negatively impacted traffic and user growth in the quarters that followed. Our ability to appeal these actions is limited, and we may not be able to revise our search engine optimization (“SEO”) strategies to recover the loss in traffic or user growth resulting from such actions. Changes in policies or their enforcement may not apply in the same manner to our competitors, or our competitors’ SEO strategies may be more successful than ours. In addition, some of these search engines are owned by companies that compete with various aspects of our business. To offset the impact on our user growth, we would need to increase our investment in other growth strategies, such as paid marketing or other initiatives that drive user acquisition, which may cost more and be less effective. Any significant reduction in the number of Pinners directed to our website or mobile application from search engines could harm our business, revenue and financial results.
I noticed that if you just right click on the google image search result and select "view image" you'll get the img src right away, in Firefox at least.
Not just image searches, the entire website is basically unusable, especially without proper filters to block whole screen popups, unwanted login prompts, and modal windows obscuring everything. Not to mention the JS messing up the browser history so you can't go back to any page, because their scripts will fuck that up and only store the first and last page in the chain.