Pinterest wants to be more than social network for DIY

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann at a company product annoucement on Thursday.

Pinterest, the social network of choice for cocktail recipes and succulent gardening, is making a play to broaden its user base beyond the DIY set.

On Thursday evening the company introduced a slew of new products for the visual discovery network, including Guided Search, a tool that seeks to guide Pinners to what they’re looking for even when a they don’t know quite know how to ask for it.

The announcement, at a lavish Pinterest headquarters party that included craft stations with activities such as learning to fold pocket squares, represents a move by the company to expand beyond its current, largely female demographics. At present, women are about four times more likely to use Pinterest than men.

But Pinterest wants users to consider it as more than just a place to curate collections of bundt cake recipes and artfully torn jeans.

“Pinterest, afterall, is about discovering things you didn’t know were out there, ” said CEO Ben Silbermann.

The idea behind Guided Search is to “guide a user through discovery” by delivering to users to what they’re searching for even when they don’t know directly how to ask for it.

Say you search road trip — Pinterest will help you sift through good ideas from other Pinners, and as you tap ones that sound interesting the site will work to send you in the right search direction. 

  

This could make Pinterest potentially valuable as a sophisticated visual search tool — and also potentially more appealing to a broader base of users.

“The problem of how you discover things is a really tough one,” Silbermann said at a conference last May. “Problems like, ‘What should my living room look like?’ That’s at the heart of our interests right now.”

Pinterest, the company said, has grown its number of pins by 50 percent in just the past six months and there are more than 750 million boards on the site, but it has still had trouble growing beyond the image of being a digital clipboard service for women.

The company also introduced a custom categories feature and updates to its related pins feature.