Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

Showing up in an image index (generated by crawlers) is different enough from showing up on Pinterest (curated by humans) that allowing one to make the choices independently is totally reasonable.

View on HN

Well at least they should honor that too since clearly the owner does not want their photos discoverable ( plus by crossing over to pinterest they become indexable, right?)

it's a stretchy argument, but one i'm going make anyway: before the crawl, there is discovery. discovery is the process of knowing all the URLs to pass to the crawler.

discovery is fueled by

  * links
  * sitemap.xml

who creates links (and sitemaps)? humans (either editorially or programmatically, but at some point humans were involved in the link creation process)

defining the pinterest fetching process as "not indexing" or "not crawling" seems a little bit unfair against your friendly neighborhood googlebot.

also if pinterest is "currated by humans" then the pin-tag would be unnecessary. a simple plain text "DO NOT PIN THIS" message in the article/product/image/.. (whatever people pin these days) description would be sufficient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com