A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Pinterest will teach CAD companies to search

Pinterest will teach CAD companies to search
Oleg
Oleg
29 April, 2014 | 2 min for reading

pinterest-guided-search

Search is a difficult problem. Especially when it comes to enterprise and organization. According to researches, more than 2/3 of people searches are not returning satisfactory results. Enterprise is messy, complicated and contains lot of unstructured data these days. CAD and other 3D files are part of this messiness. For many years, we generally thoughts of web and enterprise search as a place where text begot text – you input some text, press search, and get a bunch of relevant results, also in text form. However, in many places, and 3D and CAD is one of them, search by keywords is not very efficient.

Company have been trying to innovate in 3D or Shape search for the last decade or so. Read my old blog – 3D Shape Search in CAD and PLM. Despite many available solutions in 3D search, I can see a low adoption rate. In connection to that, I saw the opportunity to rethink 3D search.

The following article caught my attention earlier this week – In Challenge To Google, Pinterest Launches Guided Search. Pinterest is a visual discovery tool that people use to collect ideas for their different projects and interests. People create and share collections (called “boards”) of visual bookmarks (called “Pins”) that they use to do things like plan trips and projects, organize events or save articles and recipes. According to the article

At an event at Pinterest headquarters Thursday evening, CEO Ben Silbermann announced Guided Search, a new visual way to explore Pinterest’s more than 30 billion pins—links or images chosen by users and assigned by them to topical collections. Unlike most search engines, where you must choose a precisely constructed string of keywords for what you want to find, Guided Search offers suggestions as you go, based on the associations Pinterest has learned to make between all the objects in its database.

You can learn more about how guided search works here and on the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DHxkoXR0RM

The idea of “discovery” is very compelling in the engineering discipline. In many situations it is very hard to formulate a specific keyword based query to find a result. Therefore the ability to classify, categorize, slice and dice data can be very powerful to search and navigate 3D data.

What is my conclusion? Guided search is not a completely new idea. You can see that in some old enterprise search systems. However, to combine together with visual data corpus provides some fresh experience in results. The combination of technology and experience is important. Web is slowly becoming a future platform for engineers. We are spending more time online and getting additional web experience. Some web tools are providing ideas, technologies and solutions that can be re-used in engineering and product development. I think Pinterest guided search is one of examples. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
9 April, 2023

The world has shifted to a data-driven ecosystem where predictive analytics and AI automation are essential components for success in...

27 May, 2020

Lionel Grealou posted open for debate article – The Place of PLM in the Digital Future (open to debate). I...

20 April, 2015

Last week at COFES 2015, I shared my thoughts and opinion about what happens between PLM and the cloud for...

28 May, 2009

After starting a massive Excel discussion last week and continuing this week, I got a lot of comments that I...

14 January, 2019

Hello… This is Oleg with Beyond PLM and my video blog about Bill of Materials :). If you missed my earlier...

7 March, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I posted PLM Platform Wars: Who is Right or Who is Left? The following short...

4 November, 2020

The era of four digits acronyms is coming. Check out my FLaaS article. If you never heard about LCAP, it...

14 September, 2015

Many years ago, I’ve been doing some work implementing PLM-ERP integration using Microsoft BizTalk Server. It was fascinating experience. BizTalk...

19 October, 2015

The topic of “best practices” in PLM implementations usually brings lot of controversy. Since the time PDM and PLM technologies and...

Blogroll

To the top