How Pinterest ruined image searching
The fly-on-the-wall details of Google allowing Pinterest to build a $75bn business parasitising Google Images is an untold story I'd love to hear. In the meantime, Chris Stokel-Walker's satisfying retelling of what happened will suffice: How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internet.
Beloved by moodboard aficionados and wedding planners alike, the platform is hated by rank-and-file web surfers. It's not that it doesn't have its purpose; it's just that it intrudes on the search experience of pretty much everyone who doesn't want to use it. More than 28,000 Chrome users have installed Unpinterested!, an extension to remove Pinterest from Google search results, while countless others trade tips on how to craft search queries to exclude the photo-sharing website. The problem? Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account.
Google Images is carrion poisoned with risk. Perhaps Google never wanted to monetize or build out Images much for those obvious legal reasons: so much liability, so close to its core products. But it's too prestigious to kill off. Instead, the tendency has been to remove features and limit the usefulness of Goole Images. Who wants to work on a product so obviously subject to legal bullshit and bikeshedding? Pinterest is just the vulture that got fat on Google's disinterest in capitalizing on Images, because it could eat the risk.
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Rob Beschizza, Khareem Sudlow
