New Layout Test Puts Pinterest Search “Front & Center”

Pinterest is testing it’s new layout, and it makes one thing very clear: they are getting serious about search.

With each change, Pinterest hints at the direction they plan on going. Rich pins suggested that Pinterest was starting to think about monitization, Places pins suggested that they are hoping to break into the travel market, and now their new layout shows that Pinterest wants to be thought of as a search engine – leaning heavily on the interest graph.

Now when you login, you will no longer find your newsfeed link in the center of the top bar – it’s now to the right and called “Home”:

You will also notice that your profile link has been pushed to the left, and now just has your first name:

One big change Pinterest made this time around, is the chance “explore” your “interests”:

Pinterest uses the “Explore Interests” option to collect information from what you pin about to make collections of pins you would be interested in. For example, Pinterest can tell that I pin about my job as a marketer, ideas for creating my friends wedding invitations and cats quite often, so they created large collections of pins for me to check out:

The biggest change this time around is putting the Pinterest search bar front and center:

As we’ve talked about on the blog before, Pinterest is becoming the ultimate visual search. By promoting their search bar, Pinterest is not only helping undiscovered pins become discovered, they’re also creating an interest graph based on what you’re actively looking for and pinning about. We can speculate all we want about where Pinterest is going with this (will they develop an “adwords” type of platform? Will their API lead to Pinterest based online advertising?) but for now, we just have to sit and wait for time to tell us.