You are browsing your Instagram and you get a craving for a specific type of food or you are looking at some new art designs and techniques and you want to see more of those? You had either search for a certain hashtag on Instagram to get the right thing or switch to Google to get something similar because Google does it best, right?
Well, not anymore! Instagram is testing out a new feature in selected countries that allows users to directly search for keywords and it will display accounts and post descriptions that include your keyword. Say I was looking at Leonardo Da Vinci’s art and I want to find more pieces, all I have to do is just type in ‘Leonardo Da Vinci art’ and Instagram will do the work of bringing me all the posts that mention ‘Leonardo Da Vinci art’.
The feature is only being tested in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, and two others. The search feature is only for English users at the moment. It isn’t even clear how the searching algorithm works as Ashley from The Verge points out by saying, “My search for healthy recipes yielded gluten-free and paleo cookie recipes, for example, which likely isn’t what someone is trying to find when they search for healthy recipes.”
A company spokesperson said that the team considers several factors including the type of content, captions when it was posted, and more to surface relevant results. It also uses machine learning to find the highest quality content that’s relevant to you.
The search will also be limited to general interest topics and keywords that remain within Instagram’s community guidelines. So you can’t search for Trump or Biden but pasta should be no problem.
Some users have even pointed out that this may start a whole new dimension for content creators as they will now have to focus on Instagram SEO as well.
Image Source: The Verge
