[mrsteveman1]

> When I search for technical information 2 out of 3 times I get a website that I must pay to view content.

I usually get thousands and thousands of cloned websites that were likely set up in bulk using a template. They copy-paste just enough text to produce a search engine hit, while the real website it came from may not even be in the search results no matter how many pages of results I click through.

And then there are the elaborate clones of Github content, Stack Overflow, and various other technical help websites, all designed to make it look like all of those discussions are happening on the clone rather than the original. Some of them include a link back to the original, some don't. I get why some of those websites are ok with their content being openly reused (not that spammers care anyway), but in practice it destroys discoverability of their own service and wastes people's time.

Pinterest has spread through Google Images like a virus, they're plastered all over the results for searches that clearly aren't from boards made by real Pinterest users. I doubt it's a 3rd party spamming Pinterest because the only entity who actually benefits from it in practice is Pinterest itself. They've changed their onboarding pattern a lot over the years, but at one point it was virtually impossible to click through to the original website at all before the account creation popup blocked everything else.

Putting Pinterest at the top of image search results is effectively nothing more than a funnel to onboard more users for Pinterest, they rarely, if ever, have any relevance. I can't imagine why Google hasn't knocked them out of the results entirely at this point.

Whatever they're doing to combat actively hostile spam websites is either failing or they simply don't care anymore. The end result could not be more obvious.

[alvah]

"Putting Pinterest at the top of image search results is effectively nothing more than a funnel to onboard more users for Pinterest, they rarely, if ever, have any relevance. I can't imagine why Google hasn't knocked them out of the results entirely at this point." Absolutely. Pinterest makes Google Image Search much worse than it otherwise would be. I haven't clicked through to Pinterest from an image search for a while, but IIRC you couldn't click through to the image without getting 1. pestered to login and 2. having to scroll through multiple pages once you logged in. I have a vague recollection of this not being compliant with Google Webmaster Guidelines, but I can't recall which specific section, and it's not as if Pinterest is the only large player allowed to get away with breaches the average webmaster would be deindexed for.

[mulmen]

Pinterest is the genetically modified dinosaur clone theme park of the web.

The engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.