Pinterest focuses on discovery with new Guided Search
With over 750 million boards and 30 billion pins, Pinterest has seen nearly a 50 percent increase in new pins in just the last six months. Indeed, CEO Ben Silbermann even calls it the "world's largest human-curated collection of things." Therein, however, lies a problem. With so much information, it can be difficult to find what you really want, but even worse, it becomes really (really) hard to find or even discover new things that might be of interest to you.
Today, in its San Francisco office packed full of journalists and guests, Pinterest announced a new feature that promises to fix that: Guided Search. Contrasting it to Google, Silbermann said that Pinterest's new Guided Search is "more about exploration than it is about an ordered list for every person in the world." So when you type a keyword into the search bar at the top, it'll offer narrower topics that you can focus in on. For example, if you were to search for "chair," it'll show subcategories like "accents" or "living room" or "patio." Silbermann also emphasized that these would be words used by real people, so if you were to search for "hairstyles", some of the suggestions would be "medium length hair" or "up do" or "bangs."
"I can go from inspiration all the way into doing something," said Silbermann. "That's the promise of Guided Search."
To go along with Guided Search, Pinterest has also rolled out a couple of extra features, namely improved Related Pins and Custom Categories. As their names suggest, the new Related Pins now show 90 percent more related items, while custom categories expand on the 32 standard groups that Pinterest has as defaults. "We picked the categories relatively arbitrarily," admitted Silbermann, referring to when the team first chose the group names. Now you can create your own, simply by tapping a button and entering a title like "Bob Dylan".
According to Pinterest, the new search features will be rolled out in the next app updates on iOS and Android. Custom Categories, however, are still a little new to them and will be making a more gradual appearance to users.
