Pinterest is introducing a faster location search to make better use of some of the site’s other location-based features.
The social pinning site introduced Place Pins about six months ago, letting people pin their favorite travel destinations, local guides and locations.
In a recent post on the official Pinterest engineering blog, engineer Jon Parise, who helped build the new Pinterest feature for search, explains:
“There are now more than one billion travel Pins on Pinterest, more than 300 unique countries and territories are represented in the system, and more than four million Place Boards have been created by Pinners.”
For local businesses, the implications are pretty obvious.
As Alisa Meredith of Scalable Social Media reports, local businesses can pin their profile in conjunction with their listing on Foursquare (another location-based platform) and encourage fans to do the same.
Faster local search will allow customers to find your location much easier when looking for products and services like the ones you offer in your area.
You can also pin other places of interest in your region making yourself a resource on local information your customers may want to discover beyond your brand.
The key change in the new Pinterest feature is the installation of a one-box place-search interface which Parise says is more intuitive than the two box interface it displaced.
The new box allows entry of both the place name and location of your query rather then separating each element into its own box.
One example would be an entry like “city hall San Francisco” with Pinterest returning the results most closely matching the query.
In cases of more ambiguous search queries, like use of the location “Springfield,” Pinterest’s new place-search will return multiple possible interpretations of the searcher’s intent. (In this case, it might be results like Springfield, MO; Springfield, IL; Springfield MA; etc.)
The new Pinterest feature is already available for Web use and on iPhone and iPad. Pinterest says it will soon be coming to Android too.
