
With an update in May 2018, it’s now embedded in the camera, Google Assistant and Google Photos apps of many Android smartphones. This general visual search engine can analyze and return results for images ranging from products to landmarks to dog breeds. Google notably released Google Lens in 2017. Over the past two years, both companies quietly continued to develop their image recognition technology and have released major new visual search tools. Pinterest rolled out its first visual search tools in 2015, which actually followed early tools by Google and Amazon. Pinterest’s bet on visual search has paid dividends, with searches on Lens increasing 140% between February 2017-2018. Pinterest, for example, has an ambitious visual search strategy, which has produced tools such as Shop the Look, which lets users select blue dots within a pin to find similar products, and Lens, a real-time visual search tool embedded in the camera of the Pinterest App (and elsewhere). EMarketer's latest report, " Visual Search 2018: New Tools from Pinterest, eBay, Google and Amazon Increase Accuracy, Utility" looks at what is possible now using images as a starting point for search.
