Pinterest: The Visual Discovery Engine

The web has always been text-heavy, but Pinterest (launched in closed beta earlier this year) is leaning entirely into the visual. It’s a "virtual pinboard" where you can collect and organize images that inspire you-recipes, home decor, fashion, or even technical diagrams.

The "Pin It" Bookmarklet

The genius of Pinterest is the "Pin It" button. It’s a simple piece of JavaScript that you drag to your browser's bookmarks bar. When you're on a website and see an image you like, you click the button, and it scrapes all the images from the page, letting you choose one to "pin" to one of your boards.

The Grid Layout

The UI uses a multi-column fluid "masonry" layout. Instead of a rigid grid, images of different heights are packed together to fill the space. It creates a seamless "infinite scroll" experience that makes it very hard to stop looking.

// A conceptual look at the 'Scraping' logic
function scrapeImages() {
    var images = document.getElementsByTagName('img');
    for (var i = 0; i < images.length; i++) {
        // Filter for images large enough to be 'pinnable'
        if (images[i].width > 100 && images[i].height > 100) {
            displayThumbnail(images[i].src);
        }
    }
}

Outlook

Pinterest is proving that there's a different way to organize information on the web. It's not about "searching" for something specific; it's about "discovering" things you didn't know you wanted. While it’s currently being dominated by lifestyle content, the underlying model of visual curation is powerful. It’s a reminder that as our screens get better and our bandwidth increases, the web is going to become increasingly visual.

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