Instagram adds search to its web interface

Just last week, Instagram hired former Lucky magazine editor Eva Chen to strengthen its ties with the fashion industry and attract more high-quality content that brands can advertise against.

Instagram had originally been intended exclusively as a mobile app. The new website update is meant to bring some of that functionality over to the desktop. For website owners, embedding accounts and individual status updates is now encouraged and could actually help contribute to ranking in search engines.

Inside the app, Instagram does a specific number of things very well.

“We’re committed to improving discovery on Instagram across mobile and Web”, Bourgeois said.

This is why Facebook offered its service through a website in addition to its app in the first place. “There’s an untapped potential for newsrooms and journalists to use Instagram as a source of content”. So, for example, when a user clicks on a “Yosemite” location tag on a photo, they’ll be taken to a landing page with all photos tagged “Yosemite”.

This is a pretty notable expansion for Instagram in growing its desktop presence, especially while other mobile-first apps like Snapchat have shown little interest in expanding their online interfaces for desktop users. The search box is displayed in the center of the header at the top of the page.

“You have all the different options of how you might search for the subject matter that you’re looking for”, Bourgeois said.