Recently, Pinterest Founder and CEO Ben Silbermann spoke to a large crowd at their San Francisco headquarters about a new feature that will change the way you think about search. Guided Search is Pinterest’s answer to Google’s algorithm, differentiating itself by helping you discover information based on exploration and discovery, versus strictly information retrieval.

Silbermann says “Guided Search will help you discover things (when) you didn’t know how to ask the question in the first place.” I’ll explain what this means by running through some of Pinterest’s recent changes.

Pinterest’s Latest Updates

Related Pins

Related Pins help you find things that fall into similar categories based on your search. According to Silbermann, in the last 6 months, 20% more people are repining from Related Pins. What this means is that Pinterest has gotten better at showing you pins and collections that are more relevant and of quality to what you searched for. If you’re browsing electric guitars, Pinterest might show you handpicked collections from other people who also care about electric guitars, acoustic guitars, famous guitarists, guitar brands, and more for further exploration.

Categories

When Pinterest launched, it had 32 specific categories to help people narrow their search. As Pinner’s collections grew, Pinterest was having a hard time fitting everything into those categories. To cure this, Pinterest now gives you the ability to create custom categories, helping you once again find the best of what Pinterest has based on keywords and suggestions to things that relate.

Guided Search

As Silbermann puts it, there are some things that are really hard to search for because you might not know the right keywords, or because the right answer for you might not be the right answer for everyone else. He uses “Living Room Chairs” as an example of a difficult search for major search engines to provide you with great results. He points out that ads and huge e-commerce websites can make finding something you love, really complicated. You could spend hours browsing multiple websites and hundreds of itemized pages to find something. Pinterest’s Guided Search can take the same search and put you on a quest to find the perfect living room chair through specific criteria, allowing you to be more or less specific.

This idea of finding information through curated collections is not new, but Pinterest has found a great way to organize the information, optimize it for mobile, and make it extremely easy to explore the things that are most relevant to you.

Check it out!