Pinterest Launches Visual Search Technology, Instant Ideas

Advances in technology have given those in the advertising industry greater insight into consumers over the past decade.

One company hoping to continue the refinement of advertising technology is social media company Pinterest. This week at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Pinterest’s president Tim Kendall announced the company’s launch of its new feature dubbed Instant Ideas. Through this offering, users will now see a small circle at the bottom of each pin which leads to similar pins – all made possible through Instant Ideas’ visual search technology.

Pinterest is looking to use this visual search technology in a broader sense for the advertising arena in the future. Using Pinterest’s Lens product which allows users to search via their smartphone camera’s live feed or photo, launched this past February, the company plans to share these images and files with advertisers for future outreach campaigns.

Kendall shared with the TechCrunch Disrupt NY audience the company’s plans on how to work with advertisers moving forward. He said “In the near-term, it’s just going to allow [advertisers] to get a higher volume of high quality clicks. In the medium to long-term, we imagine a world that’s super compelling to advertisers. One of the things that would be possible with this technology is that you could imagine an advertiser saying ‘I want to sell my product,’ and all they have to give us is just a photograph – an image of that product. They don’t have to give us keywords. They don’t have to give us any targeting parameters. We can just use the computer vision technology to do the relevancy match and ranking.”

At this time, there is no specific timeline for when Pinterest would roll this upgraded feature of its visual search technology out to advertisers and the public.