This is increasingly what passes for a billion dollar company in SV today. Aggregating other peoples stuff and putting yourself in the middle to skim a bit off the top.
- Using Google Images search for: fun crafts.
- Results loaded with Pinterest hosted images.
- Visit any of those Pinterest hosted image pages
- The page on Pinterest may not include the image you are looking for (anymore)
- Or the Pinterest page may be an intermediary page that links to some other external website with the original image (Google doesn't give the original website the traffic)
- After 5 seconds you start getting prompts to create a Pinterest account
They are basically pissing off a huge chunk of people (anyone who searches for images on Google) for their own benefit.
This shouldn't be considered acceptable. I am not sure why anyone is defending that nasty company. You usually wouldn't defend someone in the physical world who does something similar (simple example: littering), why should it be considered OK just because it's on the Internet?
seriously I'm googling common items surrounding me and not getting ruined by Pinterest results. I even searched "wedding ring" (a common Pinterest topic) and got like 2 Pinterest results among my many non-Pinterest results.
Sites like keyword-suggestions and such? I can't think of anymore off the top of my head, but they exist and they suck.
If you mind pinterest in your google image results, add "-pinterest".
And adding -pinterest is like requiring everyone to pull down their window shade each time they drive down that street.
What exactly is Pinterest’s “product”? Shareable mood boards? They have been around for the majority of this decade and still do not have a consistent way of identifying products in pictures and giving the user the option to buy it directly from Pinterest.
As it stands, it’s still a glorified vision board, but with the industrial-scale detritus of low-resolution thumbnails across all image search engines.