“Every image search ended up turning into that little dance.” Mkantjwa would then hit the back button and try a different result - and often hit the same wall. You’d click on it, and get asked to create an account in order to get access to that image.” A lot of the images are interesting when they come up in the results. “I’d do a search for a scarf or something, and the first 10 results would come up as Pinterest. “I used to do a lot of image searches,” he says. Unpinterested!’s creator, South African developer Sello Mkantjwa, tells Input he created the extension three years ago out of frustration. But as the old internet maxim goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.’” Meanwhile, people who do use the service complain that the resolution of Pinterest images is often low. Pinterest, it should be noted, doesn’t cost anything to sign up for.

And it’s all seemingly for the goal of boosting Pinterest user numbers. This state of affairs creates friction in the image-grabbing process, which has been fine-tuned over the last 20 years to become as frictionless as possible. The problem? Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account.Īnd it’s managed to achieve an extremely strong presence on many popular image searches. 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.

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