WHY IS PINTEREST IMAGE SEARCH SO TERRIBLE?

Ahh, Pinterest. Home of beautifully photographed food, interiors and craft projects you’d never, ever, be able to recreate and more motivational quotes you can shake a yoga mat at. I’m being entirely cynical of course – of all the social media platforms that have arisen over the past couple of years, you’ve got to give Pinterest credit where it’s due – it’s community adore it, it’s managed to surpass it’s ‘viral’ status and actually become a site that’s taken seriously amongst the big guns, and frankly, it’s pretty easy on the eye. (Especially if you’re a bride to be, apparently).

I use Pinterest a lot – it helps drive traffic to other blogs I write for – particularly fashion pieces, and it’s a great place to collect images you stumble across whilst you’re crawling the web, but don’t want to store in a file you’ll forget about locally. (Not now I’m a full time Chromebook convert, that’s less of an option these days too). Working in a digitally creative job, I often find myself using Pinterest to source images to explain ideas in briefing or proposal documents for new campaigns or business pitches – the quality and ‘uniqueness’ of the images tend to be a lot better than that of Google image search, or elsewhere, and they can really help illustrate the big idea for a project.

Well, at least that’s what I wish would happen. In reality, I’m usually running late, I need an image fast, and I’m shouting at the screen asking Y U SO CRAP PINTEREST SEARCH? Take the other day, for example – I wanted an image of a cartoon house. Easy, simple, right? Nope. I typed in various variations of ‘cartoon house’ as I would with Google, and the results were endlessly dire. No, Pinterest, I don’t want a photo of a ‘real life house from the Up movie’, nor do I want a house shaped cake with iced cartoon mice peeping out the floorboard’ (Seriously, would anyone want that?). I espeically don’t want something with a big old watermark through the middle. Don’t want your shit shared? Don’t chuck it on Pinterest, fool.

According to this blog, Pinterest search is so terrible because of the descriptions put in – most users don’t both adding searchable descriptions of value, and prefer to add ‘WANT’ or ‘lol’ to their photos of Zayn from One Direction holding a panda. It’s interesting that Pinterest claims to be dedicated to fighting spam, yet those images with descriptions full of (often irrelevant) keywords still creep to the top of the listings.

I think Pinterest was always a bit ahead of itself, and perhaps it still playing catch up from when it went viral and wasn’t quite ready, but I’m willing to be patient and wait, because even when it’s operating at half it’s potential, it’s still pretty amazing. That, or I could stop being so tight and open an iStock account…

Main image from: http://pinterest.com/pin/395261304765739302/

Martin