Snapchat Just Launched Stories Search And Here's What You Need To Know
- 3 minute read
Facebook's launch of Facebook Stories this week has absolutely flooded the news. Many were quick to deem Facebook's newest update as the "Snapchat Killer" and the turning point of Snapchat's rise.
However, as always, the Snapchat team remained quiet and kept to themselves, only to release one of the biggest updates since the inception of the company as few days after Facebook's announcement.
Snapchat's latest update is the release of "Stories Search", making it now possible for it's hundreds of millions of users to search for Snaps that have been uploaded to "Our Story".
how Snapchat Stories Search works
Snapchat released Universal Search and the ability to upload Snaps to "Our Story" in January of 2017. Before, Snapchat was hand picking curated content to add to the featured Stories.
"Our Stories" or featured stories, are the ones you see for the Superbowl, NBA Finals, Presidential Election Speeches, and so on.
What's different is Snapchat is now using machine learning to scan and categorize the text and content on the submitted "Our Story" Snaps. This opens up the flood gates to give Snapchat users an infinite amount of new, searchable content.
The update is slowly being released, starting with a few specific U.S. cities. However, Snapchat's machine learning software is already archiving Snaps that are submitted to "Our Story" to be available for 24 hours to even months at a time.
Here's An Example Of How Snapchat Stories Search Works
A Snapchat user will type "puppies" into his or her search bar. Every Snapchat user that has uploaded a Snap of a puppy to "Our Story" will be able to access Snaps that have puppies in them.
Obviously, the Snaps are going to be filtered to where the most popular Snaps are shown first, and so on.
Snapchat's Stories Search Make's the App a real time youtube
Stories search changes the game for Snapchat. The days of getting lost in a Youtube rabbit hole is now being made possible on Snapchat's platform.
Snapchat users will have the ability to browse content from Snaps all over the world with an endless array of categories.
As everyone knows, Snaps disappear in 24 hours, which encourages the submission of untouched, but still compelling content that isn't found on YouTube.
Snapchat's Stories Search Could Potentially Be One of Twitter's Biggest Threats Yet
Twitter's real time aspect is focused on reading updates in real time. When there is a world event, or a game on, users flock to the platform to read updates that are fired off as the game or event is happening.
What Snapchat is shifting towards, is being able to see updates at an event in real time.
In Conclusion...
Snapchat's growth has stagnated ever since Instagram Stories was released in early 2016. With Snap's recent IPO, the camera company needs to demonstrate to investors that they can grow and eventually scale to the size of Facebook.
This new update opens up Snapchat's possibilities for growth at time where the future of the company looked grim.
This new update shows that Snap Inc. understands exactly what it needs to do be doing: continue to innovate and expand it's platform as fast as possible so Facebook can't catch up in time.