Sunday, November 15, 2015

Pinterest-Expands Visual Search

          The photo saving and sharing site, Pinterest will expand their product by adding a feature in which users will not need words to search for their desired object, but rather take a photo of it and send it into the search engine. By doing this, the user will allow Pinterest to show them similar sizes, colors, and styles of the object. Pinterest is regarded as a social network, but reportedly has longed to be seen as a search engine as well. By launching this feature Monday, it would appear they would be far ahead of their competitors in the visual search engine industry. The app is mostly used by women, as a global poll in 2012 found that 83% of users at  the time were female. This has generated the direction for Pinterest, while they attempt to get ahead in the visual search market. Both Google and Amazon have been attempting for years, but none of their attempts have taken off. One of Google's first was the inception of Google Goggles, an image- recognition app introduced in 2009 lets users retrieve information about landmark or building downtown by taking a photo. More recently, many of these major databases have been attempting a method known as deep learning, or a technique used to recognize patterns sifting through big data.


           With Pinterest launching this new visual search, the company has a high upside in the advertising industry. EMarketer expects the market for United States search advertising to over $29 billion in 2016, which would account for about half of digital advertising. Pinterest has been fast growing since its beginnings in 2010. By the end of 2011, it had already become one of the top ten social networks, with over eleven million views per week. In May 2012, Pinterest was valued at $1.5 billion and three years later, the company is valued at over $11 billion. Now, this quick ascendance certainly comes from paving the way in their respective segment of social networks. This is a company that knows to survive it has to constantly create and expand. It is for this reason that they have developed the visual search engine. If successful, this would be an example of brand extension as a company reaches outside of its formal function to offer a different service in a new market. They first got serious about visual search in 2010 when buying the image search startup, Visual Graph, created by Kevin Jing. Mr.Jing used deep learning technology similar to Facebook's face recognition to create the visual search that would eventually be snatched up by Pinterest. Pinterest already has a good stake in the social network industry, but it would be revolutionary if they managed to claim a share of the search engine industry as well. Facebook has been trying to do it for years, and has failed at doing so. Monday is a big day for not only Pinterest, but the direction and path for visual search.


http://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterest-sharpens-its-visual-search-skills-1447015155

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