The explore and search feature on Instagram allows users to find the best suited accounts to follow. Have you ever noticed that a lot of images and videos that appear on explore somehow peak your interest? Well that’s no coincidence; Instagrams platform is based on an infrastructure known as Unicorn, which happens to be the exact same search engine that Facebook uses. Unicorn is designed to search through millions sets of data within billions of users complex operations in a matter of seconds in order to provide the best results tailored for each user. How you might ask? Unicorn is based on an information retrieval system and results are promoted with social proximity (Instagram Engineering Blog, 2015). Determining social proximity is based off of people, places, hashtags and the media. This search infrastructure relies on open source libraries and has a two-step process.
· 1) Candidate generation
o Finding set of documents that match a given query
o E.g. Multiple users appear when searching “name:Justin”
· 2) Ranking
o Based on popularity
o Computers a ‘goodness score’
o E.g. justinbieber has 32.3 million
The Explore section on Instagram is awesome because it displays an arrange of photos and videos based on the interest of the user. Over the years there explore section has transformed by starting with just displaying popular content on Instagram when the app was first released to now being able to rank accounts based on each user. The media displayed is prioritized by “people followed by people you follow” or by “people followed by people who follow you”. Another way that the content is chosen is based on trending places and hashtags. Instagram is always updating their software in able to cater towards the needs of their users. For example, the future of the app is looking to expand the search feature even further by adding tabs such as ‘discovery’ or ‘content’.
If you are interested in the algorithms and technical aspects that go on behind the scenes for the Instagram app I highly recommend that you check out their blog!
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