Pinterest, which calls itself a discovery platform, unveiled Thursday a new way of searching so that users can home in on what they are looking for among the website's 30 billion pins and 750 million boards.
Guided Search is the social sharing network's newly developed mobile search engine that allows users to find the specific information they are looking for as well as uncover pins they did not know were useful or interesting to them.
The system taps into the massive amount of user-generated metadata - the titles, descriptions and comments that users attached to the pins - to find words and phrases that appear frequently and turns them into categories and sub-categories. These categories then appear in the search results and users can tap on them to bring up more specific results.
For example, if one user captions a pin with "baked egg breakfast recipe," she helps organize the pins into a specific category.
If another user searches for "breakfast" but is not sure what kind of breakfast she wants to eat that day, she can choose among the categories that appear in the search results, such as "healthy," "oatmeal," "10-minute," "baked" and "egg." If, for example, she taps on "10-minute" and suddenly decides she has time to bake something, she can go back up one level and choose another category until she homes in on the specific baked egg breakfast recipe tagged by the first user.
She can also remove any of the filters to get another set of search results. If, for instance, she does not want to eat eggs for breakfast, she can easily remove the "eggs" category and look for a baked breakfast that does not include eggs in the recipe.
"Guided search will help you discover when you didn't know how to ask for things to begin with," said Pinterest co-founder and chief executive Ben Silbermann at a press event in San Francisco.
Guided Search is designed for the Pinterest apps for Android and iOS. About three-quarters of all activities on Pinterest are done on mobile. Desktop users, which amount up to 48 million, will also be able to use Guided Search in the future, although the website did not specify any time frame.
Pinterest also rolled out Custom Categories, noting that users post a lot of content that do not necessarily fall into one of Pinterest's 32 default categories. Custom Categories is a new feature that allows users to further streamline searches. This feature will be available for both mobile and desktop users.
It also announced a new and improved Related Pins feature to include related content that may be related to the topic but do not necessarily have similar images.
Pinterest has lately shown its interest in improving search capabilities when it acquired the two-person company VisualGraph in January.
