Behind Pinterest’s push to make the world pinnable
0Behind Pinterest’s push to make the world pinnable.
“A picture is worth a thousand words” could very well describe the current search paradigm. We’ve spent years typing into a text field, but there are times when it’s hard to describe what we’re really looking for.
Traditional search engines are built around intent, but they usually fall short when it comes to discovery. This is an area where Pinterest believes it can shine. In the past couple of years, the company has sought to redefine the future of retail, one pin at a time.
In 2015, Pinterest revealed it had been working on a way to find and display visually similar images, which came out of its acquisition of VisualGraph a year prior. Initially, visual search only powered the company’s Related Pins feature, but now is more widely used, leveraging deep learning to train itself and extract information from images. “We try to understand what’s in an image,” Kevin Jing, head of the company’s visual discovery team, told VentureBeat in an earlier interview.