What adding search to Snapchat does for Snap’s post-IPO success
It’s finally happened! Snapchat is throwing their hands into the search game. After flirting with it for a while deep inside memories, search is now the second most important feature in Snapchat. After all, the secret group under Wisam Dakka in San Francisco as well as the acquisition of Vurb had to deliver something. Having worked in search for a large part of my career, I couldn’t help but write up my thoughts on this initial launch of Snapchat Search. I hope it sparks some interesting discussions!
Also, with the impending IPO, future growth potential will be under intense scrutiny and both the user base and revenue can be positively impacted by a well executed search product.
When you enter Snapchat, search is right up top. Other than taking a picture, it is the most important feature. Before we dive deep into what the current state of search is, or where it can go, let us examine why this matters.
Why does search matter?
Snapchat is a Camera company
They need to be the best at everything related to a camera and it’s ecosystem to win the market. In today’s digital world, clicking and viewing a picture is cheap. Finding it on demand is priceless, but hard. The image and video search wars having been getting hotter over the last few years with the advances in neural-network based algorithms that the leading internet companies are using to power their photo-clouds.
The upcoming IPO
With the $SNAP IPO upcoming, it’s been increasingly important for the company to showcase it’s breadth and depth as a company. On one side, we have the revenue growth on the core product and on the other side we have innovation via products like Spectacles. Search is somewhere in the middle. It adds much-needed features to the core offering while opening new sources of revenue. It’s too soon to answer whether the highly lucrative intent-filled search queries can transition to this platform.
Search is $$$
If Snapchat can use image and memory search to own a part of the search game, it can better monetize its assets as time goes on. As it goes public, the Snapchat business will be under a lot of pressure to grow. Search has proved to be a time-tested business and making Snapchat Search an important part of the user’s experience can open a great source of revenue.
Understanding Users is $$$
By understanding users’ location histories, memories and interests, Snapchat can offer a powerful targeting set to advertisers and improve the quality of ads shown to users.
Snapchat Search v1.0
The search bar in this first release of the feature is on the top of every page inside the app. While the ‘title’ for the search bar changes, it seems to be searching the exact same things in each case: your contacts and potential accounts to add. It’s the quickest way to message someone in the latest version of the app.
Based on the implementation, it seems evident that search is meant to drive more engagement via messaging while driving higher network graph density. It can even be a place to discover users and brands to follow when looking for a topic or interst. And this might make sense for the short term. But in the long term, it won’t be enough to sustain growth.
Memories as the secret weapon
The ‘Memories’ feature in Snapchat can be the secret weapon that not only makes search successful but drives Snapchat to it’s mission to be the world’s best camera company. By indexing memories properly, search can become the destination users go to look for the who, what, when and where of every memory in addition to just contacts.
Driving such behavior has two additional benefits:
- Improving search will drive users to take more pictures using the Snapchat Camera: not doing so will mean not being able to search them as well. This takes a shot at the gallery fragmentation problem on our mobile devices: some of our pictures sit within the iOS/Android galleries while others sit within our messaging apps.
- Snapchat will be forced understand users at a much deeper level, directly correlating to better ad quality.
How to Improve Search in Snapchat
Here are five ideas of what the search team at Snapchat should add to the product to make it a must-use for every user of Snapchat.
- Index memories into Snapchat Search: make sure users can search all of the autogenerated tags for pictures through the main search box. Currently, this is only available within the memories pane.
2. Index Memories into the underlying Platform’s search. In addition to making images and contacts searchable within Snapchat itself, make sure these entities are indexed by the platform’s search index: Spotlight or Google Now. This way a user can search for content or people within Snapchat even before they are in the app. This will also train the user to think about Snapchat as the place for memories search.
3. Improve its machine vision capabilities. The understanding of images by the Snapchat app seems to be rudimentary at this point compared to the offerings from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple. The example for sushi in #1 above shows how far behind Snapchat is. Serious help in this area is needed if Snapchat is to truly understand the captures from its cameras globally!
4. Improve location based search: in addition to indexing the inferred contents of pictures, the app should index the location of each image. This is arguably easier and a good way to make a lot of progress. Both the iOS Photos app and Google Photos app have done this and it is par for course.
5. Add the ability to tag friends in a user’s private collection to significantly improve search. Google Photos does a great job at this. By grouping similar faces together and asking the user to give the face-group a name, Google is not only learning more about the user’s (arguably close) social network, but also making the search experience that much better.
This should be a power-search-user feature because it requires input from the user without too much instant gratification. The long term benefit to the user is great, especially if the platform can start autotagging user photos based on the learning set that is generated by this initial process.
It was important for Snapchat Search to launch now
As Snapchat gets ready for its IPO, the launch of search should show investors that the company isn’t just resting on past laurels and continues to innovate in areas that aren’t its traditional strong suits. These areas (hardware, and now search) have potential to grow into significant businesses on their own if grown carefully while enriching an already engaged and growing ecosystem of users. Getting search right has the ability to not only transform Snapchat from a communication tool into a utility that is the home to each of its users’ lifetime of memories while also providing the company with the much needed data to make its ads business that much more efficient.
It’ll be interesting to watch what the team does in the coming months. I’d love to hear your feedback. Do comment and share with others who you think can add to our discussion on this topic.
You can follow me on Snapchat or Twitter @jain_ankit.
