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Comment by jwegan | Hacker News Reader

Hey, I run the Growth team at Pinterest. I just wanted to comment on the article to be very clear and say we have never scraped Google search results either currently or at any time in the past.

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I have two questions for you then.

First, if you insist that you have not scraped data then can you offer an alternative explanation for the data being presented here?

Second, it's pretty clear that the majority of at least the tech community hates what you do with the regwall. Do you not know how bad your site's behavior makes GIS for those of us who aren't interested in joining it? Or do you just not care?

I'm guessing that they use one or more third parties that do indeed scrape Google results but provide plausible deniability in the process. And I'd look very closely at the employment histories of principals at those nominal "third" parties. It's not that uncommon in this industry to find companies with exactly one customer, staffed entirely by ex-employees of that one customer.

Interesting. Can you cite any examples if it isn't uncommon?

I think my comment presents a far more likely scenario than scraping Google search results.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708642

Are you aware of anyone who is not financially incentivized by Pinterests success that thinks your practices are acceptable?

Can you help explain why the Pin descriptions are so similar (or often exactly the same) as what's in the SERPs elsewhere?

Do you think it's bad that Pinterest is known as an annoying site? What are you doing about it?

At the point where you're actively polluting google search results as if you had such a scraping program, is this a meaningful distinction to make for anyone other than Google's TOS compliance team?

"We" is the growth team, or all of pinterest?

Not specific to the article but about the growth team structure at Pinterest.

Is growth an engineering/product led org? Does it have a marketing leader as well?

I've come across a couple instances where growth responsibilities seem not in the land of marketing and I'm curious how those teams are structured and why.

Do you scrape information from any site?

> we have never scraped Google search results either currently or at any time in the past.

Just an observation that this very specific denial without offering anything else makes me think that what they _actually_ do is probably controversial as well.

Your company is the reason images.google is useless unless -pinterest is used.

"100 presents for grandmothers 2019" is just web badfaith, sleazy internet pollution.

There's a Chrome extension [1] just to filter out Pinterest results, because Pinterest fills the results with crap. As the head of the team responsible for the need for this extension, are proud of the work you do?

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...

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