Pinterest has been growing in popularity month over month, but that hasn’t stopped them from expanding their product. Much like Facebook, the pin-board social network keeps making changes large and small as it grows, trying to deliver the best product possible to both its users and advertisers. Today, they have made a large step forward by acquiring the search-focused company VisualGraph. What does this mean for Pinterest marketing moving forward? Let’s take a look.
Essentially, VisualGraph’s technology will make Pinterest users better able to search through the ever increasing mass of pins on the site. VisualGraph is a small company, with owners Kevin Jing and David Liu being the only employees, but their tech is powerful. Pinterest says the acquisition “will help us build technology to better understand what people are Pinning. By doing so, we hope to make it easier for people to find the things they love.”
The reason Pinterest wanted VisualGraph specifically is that their technology is able to recognize an astounding number of objects in pictures. With this tech implemented, Pinterest users will be able to type a term like “blue sweater” and find nearly every blue sweater available on Pinterest, even if their is no associated meta info detailing the image as such. The graph can also filter pornography, which is important to Pinterest as it grows as a family friendly brand.
Here is how the boys at VisualGraph describe their new jobs at Pinterest:
On Pinterest, millions of people are curating and sharing billions of Pins everyday. And these Pins are more than just images — they link to contents that can inspire and enrich people’s lives. We are excited for the opportunity to combine machine vision with human vision and curation, and to build a visual discovery experience that is both aesthetically appealing and immensely useful for people everywhere.