It drives me absolutely bonkers when I click on an image in my google search, thinking it will take me to the relevant page where said image was posted, but really I just get a Pinterest page which I neither have nor want an account for. As for Quora, in theory I wouldn’t mind having a question / answer site pop up as a result but it’s nearly impossible to see the question with the answers, there’s always a dozen other random questions on the same page and it drives me insane!
In: Technology
In the early days of Google, what made a page famous was ‘how many links point to you’ (the Page-Rank algorithm). It’s good in theory but too easy to abuse to get on top. This is why back in the time, wikipedia was so often on top: they have a load of link pointing to them (mostly internal links, but eh).
Now Google and other search engines have refined that process. It’s not an easy task, and well guarded trade secrets. This is called Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short). They include a tooon of metrics, and complex algorithms to optimize. They may also heavily rely on your location, profile, and search/visits history (Google does, but it’s not privacy friendly). Google also looks at how secure (full https or not) a website is, how friendly it is to mobile devices, and many more shady metrics. You can pay to be on top (in ads) also.
Finally, they also make use of the “popularity” of a website, based on what they know. Popular websites will be recommended more often. And obviously, quora and pinterest are very popular, well indexed, boosted their SEO with professionals, and contain a lot of content that is likely to match your query. Google also tries to “read” images with AI (“this image may contain a person sitting at a table, eating with their family”), so that when you search for “person table family” you can match the image. Pinterest contains an enormous quantity of images, well parsed and indexed by Google, making it likely to find them.
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