Help me make Pinterest be less terrible

October 2, 2019 6:36 PM

I do google image searches to get ideas for projects. More often than not, pictures I'm interested in show up on GIS but takes me to a pinterest page, but then i can't get anymore information about the picture because pinterest seems like a black hole of bad links. How do I stop pinterest be less terrible?

I feel like I've started to cross over into the threshhold of being and old person getting annoyed by technology with this.

Here's a typical scenario I want to stop.

1) Search [image subject] in Google Image Search
2) Find interesting picture that I want a higher quality and maybe the context around the picture ---> click picture
3) Picture takes me to a picture that someone pinned on their pinterest board. On pinterest, I click the picture again, and it almost invariably links to an external website where the picture that was pinned cannot be found.
. So I'm left with some weird low quality picture that only exists on the pinterest board and the linked website that the picture was supposedly pinned from also doesn't provide me with the context or detail around the picture.

How do I stop this loop? I'm looking to either:
* Stop pinterest boards from showing up in my google image searches
* Figure out what i'm doing wrong on pinterest - I just want the links attached to the pictures to work!

posted by Karaage to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: Yeah, pinterest is horrible for image results. Add

 -site:pinterest.com

to your search terms to exclude pinterest from results.
posted by quinndexter at 6:56 PM on October 2, 2019 [18 favorites]

Use Tineye
posted by Ideefixe at 7:19 PM on October 2, 2019 [5 favorites]

From google or pinterest, you can right click on an image and click "search Google for image" which can sometimes help to find the original source. And then you can combine this tip with quinndexter's by adding -site:pinterest.com to filter the results!
posted by acidic at 7:24 PM on October 2, 2019 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Yep, I hate this as well. What I did was went to Google's Advanced Image Search and then scrolled down to the "site or domain" box and typed in -pinterest. Then I right-clicked in the "all these words" box on top and selected "add a smart keyword for this search" (I use Firefox) and made it so that now when I type GINP (google images non-pinterest, you can name this whatever you want) and then a keyword it gives me Google Image results without Pinterest links. It's great!
posted by jessamyn at 8:03 PM on October 2, 2019 [20 favorites]

it gives me Google Image results without Pinterest links. Oh that's brilliant. Thank you from the bottom of my driven-to-despair heart.
posted by Thella at 12:17 AM on October 3, 2019

Argh. Just realised this was about *image* search, not standard. My apologies for not reading properly.
posted by quinndexter at 2:34 AM on October 3, 2019

Best answer: Using the pinterest.com exclusion was great until I did some searches that gave me top results from pinterest.etc, ie. many other country sites. To avoid this you can use -site:pinterest.* This also works for etsy and ebay although not for the top line of sponsored results. You can used them together which should get you some links to actual creative sites.
posted by Botanizer at 6:17 AM on October 3, 2019 [6 favorites]

Best answer: For an even easier way to exclude Pinterest items, you might try Google Hit Hider (documentation here). It might save you a little bit of typing.
posted by kristi at 7:37 AM on October 8, 2019 [1 favorite]