On Sunday, November 9th, Pinterest engineering announced their new Pinterest visual search tool in a blog post
The visual search tool is still being rolled-out. It’s working on one of my accounts, metrony, yet in a first ever occurrence, the search tool is not on my Pintalk account which always gets the new features the day they become available! You know it is working on the desktop version of Pinterest when you see a small square, targeting tool in the upper right portion of any pin’s image. The search tool is cool. Here’s how it works.
To use the Pinterest visual search tool:
- Click or tap on the targeting square once to activate the tool. [Image 1]
- The original pin will move to the left portion of your screen, and pins with similar images will fill the screen to the right of the pin. [Image 2]
- The targeting square itself will be too big and spill off the right side or the pin. Resize it by dragging the upper left corner of the search target to reduce the size of the box.
- Drag the target square over any portion of the pin image. [Image 3]
Pinterest will find more images like the portion that is within the targeted area. Pinners can also click on the keywords at the top of the screen to narrow down search results. If you drag the target off the edge of the pin, the tool freaks out and shows you nothing!
Below, I narrowed the tool on the toilet tissue. Pinterest’s visual search tool was unable to find any matches! [image 4]
Have fun playing with the visual search tool. You’ll see it gets tripped up by surfaces and can show users inaccurate results. I narrowed it down to the front portion of a toilet tank [Image 5], and it showed me other porcelain objects like bowls and bathtubs!
