Apr 25, 2014

0 Pinterest’s had a busy last few months: It launched its “ place pins ” back in November, reports surfaced last month about an imminent “ promoted pins ” launch, it purchased an image-search startup called VisualGraph , and much more. Today the company is officially announcing three more items: Guided Search, Custom Categories, and improvements to its Related Pins feature. To date, Pinterest says it has 750 million boards and 30 billion pins, and has grown by 50% in last six months. With this amount of data, it now wants to refine the connections not only between pins, but also between its users and all the pins living on its site. “How can we help you discover things you care about?” is Pinterest current theme, in the words of its chief executive Ben Silbermann. Guided Search Pinterest seems to be on a mission to index its pins, and to help its users search and discover pins through this new and more advanced searching. Guided Search works like this: If you’re not quite sure what it is you are looking for, start typing the closest or first thing you come up with, and Pinterest will start pulling up categories and keywords that not only start with the same letters, but also ones that are related to these possible keywords. “Guided search will help you discover when you didn’t know how to ask for things to begin with,” said Silbermann. The team that worked on Guided Search aimed to make this feature a “one-handed feature” — its predictive abilities is supposed to cut down on the amount of typing a user would do. “It’s focused on discovery, rather than finding,” said Naveen Gavini who worked on the Guided Search feature. Silbermann added that Guided Search will go live both in the App Store and Google Play store tonight. Custom Categories Pinterest had 32 categories when launched, and Silbermann admits they were largely arbitrary. However, the company has realized that much of its users’ interests doesn’t fall neatly into these categories. So its now expanding categories into more narrowly focused or alternative ones. “If there’s something your interested in that isn’t encapsulated in the 32 categories” you can now search for it with keywords, said Silbermann. Because it’s a new feature, Pinterest will be rolling it out slowly because. Related Pins Related pins are suggested pins the service recommends in an effort to help users discover more pins. Related Pins isn’t new but Pinterest is now broadening the coverage — over 90% of pins will have Related Pins attached to them. Furthermore, it goes with the company’s current theme of helping its users discover more items on its site. Surprisingly, the company has yet to make any more announcements related to its monetization efforts, though it probably should. The company has been around since 2008, and has only recently introduced ideas to bring in revenues such as “Promoted Pins,” though it hasn’t rolled out any large-scale efforts. But on a high note, it appears that its purchase of the two-man VisualGraph (for its talent) has had influence on all three of the above product improvements and releases. Gavini confirmed that although VisualGraph’s team has not been working on a particular project yet, it has been generally contributing to Pinterest’s search and discovery efforts.