Visual Discovery at Pinterest
This work addresses visual discovery for Pinterest users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing services and technologies.
Pinterest developed a visual discovery engine to enhance search and recommendation services, resulting in significant improvements in user engagement.
Over the past three years Pinterest has experimented with several visual search and recommendation services, including Related Pins (2014), Similar Looks (2015), Flashlight (2016) and Lens (2017). This paper presents an overview of our visual discovery engine powering these services, and shares the rationales behind our technical and product decisions such as the use of object detection and interactive user interfaces. We conclude that this visual discovery engine significantly improves engagement in both search and recommendation tasks.