Pinterest as a Search Engine
You are using the Pinterest search engine to drive traffic to your own website. Pinterest debuted The Taste Graph in 2017 to enhance targeting. They said:
By understanding people’s evolving tastes, preferences, and interests, the Pinterest Taste Graph connects the millions of people on Pinterest to hundreds of billions of fresh ideas that are just right for them. It’s how we surface the perfect ideas for each Pinner, helping them find fresh ideas to love as they move through the various stages of planning their lives.
Pinterest spent years refining their understanding of user behavior and turning it into an actionable resource for businesses.
Several businesses have been able to leverage Pinterest for website traffic. Ben Silbermann, Pinterest’s co-founder and CEO, had this to say about how the search engine functions:
We often talk about Pinterest as like a human indexing machine. Google built these crawlers that would go out, and these amazing algorithms. We give people tools that let them organize in a way that makes sense to them, and in doing that they organize in a way that makes sense to other people.
You must show Pinterest that your pins are relevant to the terms users search for. Relevance refers to how closely your pin fits your audience’s interests, recent search history, and distinct searches.
Pinterest’s engineering team shared an overview of how they extract and assign keywords to pin images. Pinterest assigns pins keywords called annotations that are between one and six words long. They then assess your pin’s relevance to these keywords with a confidence score based on the quality of the information extracted (text-based keywords are more highly rated) and how many times that keyword appears.
In this graphic, the two Maseratis are more like one another than they are to the Honda. This is reflected in the cosine similarity scores.
