pinterestsucks

I heard there was some incestual stuff at medium-high levels of relevant google org/teams and pinterest in terms of people moving between the companies and being friends/favors. Also that these specific teams at google are mediocre at best now and all the good engineers and product focused people have moved on to greener pastures. Probably why google image search has stagnated hard (I find bing and yandex out perform it easily depending on your searches).

The explanation that Pinterest is just "good at SEO" never made sense to me because at their scale someone at google obviously would notice and could decide to counter their SEO tricks etc (google has never had problem with doing this before).

Not to sound conspiratorial but from what I know I find it more plasubile that mid level decision makers at google can block any change that would nuke pinterest because they or their social circle have personal interest in keeping pinterest up while issue is not close to big enough or impacting larger revenue to attract attention from above.