November 9, 2015 - 13:33 AMT
Pinterest launches tool to help find visually similar things

Pinterest is enhancing is search engine to help users better discover new and interesting content, Engadget reports.

The company announced that starting on Monday, November 9, it’ll launch a new visual search tool which allows you to take any existing pin, zoom into any part of the associated image, and then get results for visually similar pins. This offering will be available to all of the more than 100 million monthly active users globally across iOS, Android, and the Web.

“Sometimes you spot something you really love on Pinterest, but you don’t know how to find it in real life, or what it’s even called,” Kevin Jing, an engineering manager at Pinterest wrote in a blog post. “There’s that perfect lamp hiding in a Pin of someone’s living room, or maybe a random street style shot with the exact shoes you’re looking for.”

When you spot something in a pin that you’d like to know more about, tap on the search tool that’ll appear in the corner of the image. Then select the specific part of the pin you’re interested in (kind of like cropping the image), and Pinterest’s deep learning algorithm will scan that selection and pull up associated Pins that it thinks match. The company says that you’ll be able to further filter the results by topic.