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Pinterest Search Is Now Customized By Gender

Aiming to attract more men to its social bookmarking network, the company is serving different search results for males and females.

Martin Beck on January 23, 2015 at 2:39 pm

Pinterest has adjusted its Guided Search system to serve results that differ depending on whether the user is female or male.

The change is part of efforts by Pinterest to attract more men to its network (according to comScore 71% of Pinterest’s 72.5 million users in December were women).

We covered the search change yesterday on Marketing Land and today Pinterest officially acknowledged it in a post on its engineering blog:

These customized search results appear for thousands of different search terms, and are based on what others are Pinning. So the next time you’re on Pinterest, try searching for hair, shoes or health and see for yourself how spot on your results are. (Not getting the results you’re looking for? Make sure you’ve selected your preferred gender in your settings.)

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of how a search for “shoes” looks for a female and male user:

Pinterest also today announced that has had success in adding more men to its roster of users, increasing its total of U.S. males by 73% in 2014. You can read more about that here: Pinterest Continues Its Manhunt, Touts Growth Among U.S. Males

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor. Follow Martin on Twitter (@MartinBeck), Facebook and/or Google+.