There are now nearly one billion "Place Pins" on Pinterest, the company
said in an email Monday. And with that announcement, Pinterest moves one
step closer to becoming a true search engine alternative to Google.
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Now, Pinterest's Place Pins aren't going to replace Google
Maps anytime soon—or ever. But for users that would rather graze than
pinpoint one exact spot, Place Pins are great for browsing various
locales around the globe.
Place Pins are enhanced Pinterest images, better known as
“pins,” with the addition of location metadata. Powered by Foursquare,
you can use Place Pins to give a pin a physical address that you and
other users can find on a map. Pinboards can collect arbitrary travel
hotspots, like this board of world beaches, along with their physical locations recorded on a map.
A Very Pinteresting Search Dilemma
Pinterest's visual search engine is powered by millions of
individuals that curate and organize its content according to what
users deem most relevant. But with billions of pins, that’s a ton of
data—and users simply can’t organize all of it alone.
Place Pins are just one of the ways Pinterest is working
on surfacing that data—by tying topic-specific metadata to various pins
to make them show up in more relevant searches. Thanks to Rich Pins,
which appear as normal pins with auto-generated captions, Pinterest
can categorize those pins into verticals for movies, recipes, articles,
products and places.
Before Pinterest and other Visual Web networks came along,
we generally thought of the Web as a place where text begot text—you
input some text, press search, and get a bunch of relevant results, also
in text form. On Pinterest, however, a text-based search leads to
relevant image results—without losing any of that context in the
transfer.
So far, Pinterest is trying to improve search by going
vertical and providing more metadata for different types of pins,
including locations. That way—ideally—searching for pins about
backpacking through Europe won’t result in a bunch of European-made
backpacks.
You might be thinking, "So what? Google has a visual
search engine." But what makes Pinterest unique is that it's not just a
visual search engine; it’s a user-curated one. That means to guarantee
accurate search results, Pinterest needs to nudge users into actually
using Rich Pins.
A Scheme To Get Rich Pins Quick
Pinterest’s Place Pins milestone is proof that users are
adopting the Rich Pin feature in droves. Keep in mind, however, Place
Pins are only five months old; Foursquare and Pinterest announced the partnership in late November 2013.
The month before Place Pins was revealed, Pinterest filed a
trademark infringement suit against PinTrips, a Pinterest clone built
specifically for flight search. The suit was notable because Pinterest
revealed in the legal complaint just how many pinners use Pinterest for travel:
“Pinterest users have posted more than 660 million PINS in
Pinterest’s ‘Travel’ category to date. Many people use Pinterest as a
travel-planning tool.”
That number is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s assumed the
‘Travel’ category was built up over the course of Pinterest's five-year
existence. Meanwhile, Place Pins have hit the one billion mark in fewer
than five months of existence.
We also have some data about Article Pins, another kind of Rich Pin. Last fall, the company said five million of its daily pins included
article metadata. However, Place Pins are opt-in, while article
metadata attaches itself automatically when a user pins from a news site.
If one thing is certain, it’s that Pinterest is not here
to compete against Google. Pinterest's search weaknesses are Google's
strengths, and likewise, what Google is bad at doing Pinterest is
really, really good at. As co-founder Evan Sharp told ReadWrite:
“People don’t think about searching 'living room
inspiration' on Google. They literally don’t do that because the results
don’t work, and they become accustomed to not searching that. But on
Pinterest that can be a really fruitful and valuable thing to search.”
In its exploration of visual search, Pinterest is
attempting to meet its userbases’ unique set of requirements by creating
a search engine that solves different problems—or at least solves them
differently. So Pinterest may never reach Google's level of popularity,
but when it comes to exploring the world through search, Pinterest's
plan is looking awfully good.
#Source:
Pinterest Emerges As Unlikely Google Competitor
Apr. 15, 2014
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Pinterest 'Place Pins' Put Travelers On The Map
Pinterest 'Place Pins' Put Travelers On The Map
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