Searching through visual content continues to gain significance as a new generation of Internet users jump on board. At the Wired Business Conference, Instagram Cofounder Mike Krieger said the site remains in its early days of helping visitors wade through the visual content, and believes there's much more work to do to make search easier and photos more discoverable for its more than 300 million users.
On any given day, users probably see about 100 photos in their feed, and it's pretty difficult to discover the rest of them, Krieger told Wired.
As the number of posted images grows, social sites now see the need for better visual search. People on Instagram post an average of 70 million photos daily, according to company stats. The site also estimates that users have shared about 30 million photos, quite a few to search through. There are places to search on news in a text format, but Kreiger told Wired that Instagram wants people to use the site to see a real-time view of what's happening in the world, rather than read about it on Twitter or on one of the search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Earlier this month, Flickr added new features to help site visitors search for content. The advanced search technology and computer vision algorithms let users search for images of specific items or places, or search by holiday, date or location. Users also can search for images of specific things because the technology takes into consideration a user's intent and finds photos of an ice cream cone or, more specifically, an ice cream soda. Flickr also added filter images by color, size, and orientation, discovering panoramic shots of the sky with blue and magenta hues.
Digital Asset Optimization - Instagram needs to look at what they can do with brands.. =)