Pinterest is enhancing is search engine to help users better discover new and interesting content.
The company announced that starting on Monday, it’ll launch a new visual search tool which allows you to take any existing pin, zoom into any part of the associated image, and then get results for visually similar pins. This offering will be available to all of the more than 100 million monthly active users globally across iOS, Android, and the Web.
“Sometimes you spot something you really love on Pinterest, but you don’t know how to find it in real life, or what it’s even called,” Kevin Jing, an engineering manager at Pinterest wrote in a blog post. “There’s that perfect lamp hiding in a Pin of someone’s living room, or maybe a random street style shot with the exact shoes you’re looking for.”
When you spot something in a pin that you’d like to know more about, tap on the search tool that’ll appear in the corner of the image. Then select the specific part of the pin you’re interested in (kind of like cropping the image), and Pinterest’s deep learning algorithm will scan that selection and pull up associated Pins that it thinks match. The company says that you’ll be able to further filter the results by topic.
This new visual search tool builds upon services that Pinterest has debuted over the past couple of years. Two years ago, the company debuted related Pins, which showed you results based on things that you’ve saved in boards or pins that you’ve liked. That drastically changed earlier this year when Pinterest enhanced it with deep learning and planned to utilize object recognition (!), through its acquisition of VisualGraph, to make its service more efficient.
Another key component of this visual search tool is Guided Search, which launched in 2014. This is a tool that provided you with pins based on what you’ve typed — even if you didn’t know what you’re looking for. Pinterest’s software engineer on its Discovery team Kevin Ma, stated previously: “Since its launch, Guided Search has become an important driver of Pinterest search traffic and Pinner engagements.”
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Pinterest says that it took four engineers a few months to develop the core functionality of this visual search system: how images were represented. The company collaborated with the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center to apply deep learning to analyze images across its “annotated dataset of billions of pins”. As a result of this project, the team built a distributed index and search system with open source tools to enable Pinterest’s back end to scan the massive amounts of images that are within Pinterest’s database.
Working with the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center isn’t surprising as the two have had a pre-existing partnership. In fact, the center’s director, Professor Trevor Darrell, is an advisor to the company and Pinterest has hired two students from there.
As deep learning is being applied, you can expect some errors in the beginning, but Pinterest says that the more you post to the site, the better the technology will be and adapt to make visual discovery that much better.
This visual search capability will likely mesh well with Pinterest for both users and brand advertisers. With the former, it’ll make it easier to find what they’re looking for by just pointing and clicking (in a manner of speaking). How often have you seen an image, wanted to find what a specific object was, but couldn’t come up with words to describe it?
In the latter situation, brands may see an opportunity to apply a Promoted Pin so that if you’re looking for a dining room table that’s from IKEA or Crate & Barrel, or perhaps a suit from Tom Hardy, or even that Omega watch from the new James Bond movie “Spectre”, brands could have their pins show up in a user’s feed as being related. Pinterest hasn’t disclosed how this’ll work right now, but it’s probably not that far-fetched to think that this scenario could happen.
Pinterest certainly isn’t the only one deploying image recognition to help people search — Google, Facebook, and Snapchat to name a few — but it’s significant for the company. Billing itself as a visual search and discovery engine, it’s the new Google where people can just browse and click to find what they’re interested in. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, that definitely says a lot.
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Pinterest now lets you find visually similar things inside of pins
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