Pinterest Just Rolled Out a Nifty Visual Search Feature The tool allows users to refine searches through images.
By Nina Zipkin
Whether you're using Pinterest to plan the perfect party or decorate your home, as helpful as it can be to generate ideas, sometimes you want to actually figure out how to get your hands on the exact item you see in the photo. This week, the image bookmarking platform unveiled a new visual search tool help users do just that.
So how does it work? If you see something you like, you can hit the little gray and white magnifying glass in the top right hand corner and can drag your mouse to put a box around the part of the image you want to learn more about.
Related: What You Need to Know About Those New Blue Price Tags on Pinterest
That will yield a selection of visually similar results and tags you can choose from based on what's in the photo to narrow down the search. To take it a step further, when focused in on the specific item, whether it's a lamp or a chair or a dress, Pinterest will give the user the exact name and where it can be purchased.
The feature is now available for both mobile and web. This new search tool is not the only step that Pinterest, which was valued at $11 billion in March following a $367 million funding round, has taken lately to make ecommerce a seamless part of the user experience.
At the end of June, the company unveiled buyable pins for mobile iOS users. As of last week, the 60 million pins accompanied by the blue "Buy it" buttons became available for Android users. The announcement on the company blog about the rollout for Android also included a look at the new Pinterest Shop, a curated marketplace that will come to mobile over the next several weeks.
Related: Pinterest Pegged at $11 Billion After Raising $367 Million in New Funding
