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Pinterest becoming a search company ala Google?

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Maybe not for text search, but visual search.

Pinterest just raised $200 million in venture capital money at a $5 billion valuation. That brings the total amount raised by the social network to $764 million.

The Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Eric Van Susteren (@SVBizEric) reports that investors are betting on Pinterest becoming big in search – Google’s area.

The company announced a feature called guided search, which attempts to divine what a user might be looking for as they enter a search term by analyzing data about the images they’ve pinned, or bookmarked on the site, in the past.

When that feature was announced, CEO Ben Silberman said, “Pinterest at its heart is about discovering things you didn’t even know were there.”

If that sounds familiar, it should, because Google was saying basically the same thing four years ago when it launched Google Instant, which attempts to do about the same thing only in the query bar of its search engine (you know — that autocomplete feature).

Pinterest’s view of search is not as we think of search today. It’s more so discovery where via machine learning we are presented with what computers think we might be interested in.

Lawyers doing litigation ought to understand the same concept from e-discovery and predictive coding. The basis of discovery there is also machine learning.

Pinterest sees the world moving from text (Google’s sweet spot) to visual things like photos and video. Especially so with mobile where it’s easier to take a picture than text.

Rather than backlinks being the basis for search, Van Susteren, reports:

Pinterest hopes that by analyzing what people pin, how they organize things into collections, and how they share those things, Pinterest can use the collective intelligence of its users to draw conclusions that are still very hard for pure machine learning to make.

Drawing on the collective intelligence of users is the future of search – or better put, discovery. We’ll be presented with news, information, and other results based on the collective actions of people in our social circles and people with similar interests.

Many of us our visual. Especially so on mobile, where up to 50% of people are receiving news and information. Both directly from news sources and from social media.

What’s this mean for lawyers and law firms? Nothing earth shattering overnight.

But as Pinterest, and Google, get better at visual search, we’ll all need to do a better job of providing insight and commentary in a visual way. And we’ll need to get that visual insight indexed at places like Pinterest.

Many of us are visual learners. Pinterest is living proof. So is the mobile web.

Places like Pinterest and Google making the visual discoverable will be the key to making it work.

As Sustersen points out, a $5 billion valuation doesn’t sound so crazy when you’re playing in an area with a company with a $400 billion valuation, Google.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Michael Beck