Back in 2013, Snapchat has launched its “Stories” feature and was just known to be a way for Snaps to be shared and seen by friends. But now, your snaps can be viewed publicly and not just viewed – it can now be searched! With millions of Snaps around the world from millions of users, it could be a little overwhelming for Snapchat’s curation team to sort it all out and hand-pick stories for you. And according to a blog post, it is what inspired the curation team to create something new – the Search function. Several applications may have the identical features as Snapchat that drove the team to create something new that other applications don’t have yet. It is the Search tool that they have recently launched that they believe will make users turn to Snapchat when they want specific live videos. Snaps are not automatically open for public searches. They need to be uploaded first in Snapchat’s collaborative story called “Open Story” where anyone can contribute videos and photos in order to be found.
When you open Snapchat, you are accessible to search for over 1 million stories worldwide. At the search bar on top of the application’s main page, you can type whatever content you want to find or search for. Basically, this means you can type “pets” and stories featuring pets will be displayed and available to be watched. You can also catch up to a match you missed. For example, you can type “Chicago Cubs Game” and footages of the game will come up.
Snapchat uses machine learning to categorize stories according to their caption text, location, time and even the video or photo visual content itself. Other features for Snapchat are currently in progress such as categorization of Story uploads by the voices or music played in the video. Sooner or later, users would be able to search for a song lyric or a particular conversation topic in Snapchat.
As of now, Snapchat Search is currently rolling out to just “select” US cities. There are still no details on what cities exactly are accessible with this new tool. But presumably, it will be available to the rest of the world soon. So, don’t panic if you can’t see Search in your Snapchat today.
Is the Snapchat Search tool available in your location right now? Are you excited for this new feature? Let us know in the comments below!