How Pinterest’s visual search went from a moonlight project to a real-world search engine | TechCrunch

For more details, see Engineering Shop the Look on Pinterest (Pinterest Engineering blog)

"“From a computer vision perspective we have a lot of images where visual search makes sense,” Zhai said. There’s this product/data-set fit. Users that come to Pinterest, they’re often in this visual discovery experience mode. We were in the right place at the right time where the technology was in the middle of a revolution, and we had our data set, and we’re very focused on iterating as quickly as we can and get user feedback as fast as we can.”

The end result was Lens, a product Pinterest launched earlier this month that allows users to basically point at an object in the real world with their camera and return search results for Pinterest. While a semi-beta was launched last year, Lens was the result of years of scrapped prototypes and product experimentation that eventually produced something that would hopefully turn the world collectively into a bunch of pins that were searchable through your camera, creative lead Albert Pereta said."

How Pinterest’s visual search went from a moonlight project to a real-world search engine | TechCrunch