Instagram Upgrading Keyword Search

Instagram users’ ability to look is getting an upgrade. Today, the corporate announced that English-speaking users in six countries, including the united kingdom, the US, Ireland, and Canada, are going to be ready to search the platform using keywords. Before today, they might only look for hashtags or accounts. So, for instance, if you previously wanted to find “healthy recipes,” you’d only be able to search for posts that tagged #healthyrecipes or account with variations on “healthy recipes” in their name or bio. Now, however, Instagram will let people search the keywords themselves, meaning posts that feature healthy recipes should surface, albeit the precise tag is missing.

It’s unclear how the service determines what a post is about, though. My look for healthy recipes yielded gluten-free and paleo cookie recipes, for example, which likely isn’t what someone is trying to seek out once they look for healthy recipes.

A company spokesperson says the team considers “a number of 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 very best quality content that’s relevant to you.” For now, only grid posts will show up.

This is a comparatively big change for surfacing content. Instagram has always been frustratingly limited in giving people the power to seek out the posts they actually need. Instagram says only certain terms are going to be searchable, though. “The search is restricted to general interest topics and keywords that are within Instagram’s community guidelines,” the spokesperson says.

My keyword search is already live, and I’m unable to look for “vaccines,” “QAnon,” or maybe “Trump” or “Biden.” I can search “puppies,” “pasta,” or “flowers,” however. The search is definitely limited. Still, for the seemingly few benign things people can look for, the keywords are useful and can likely help users find new content that better fits what they need.