Pinterest hires Google’s Randy Keller as its head of search

With renewed focus on its visual discovery tools, Pinterest has made an important hire in the form of Google’s former image search veteran, Randy Keller, who led a team of 40 engineers at Google, according to his LinkedIn page.

In his ten year career at the search engine company, Keller was responsible for image search ranking, related images, guided search, and other emerging efforts. At Pinterest, he has now been appointed to a completely new position — head of search. Apparently, he will be reporting to Vanja Josifovski, himself a former Google executive and the head of discovery engineering.

“Pinterest is the most exciting opportunity in visual discovery today, and I look forward to contributing my expertise in image search quality and ranking to the team responsible for helping millions of people discovery billions of ideas every day. Pinterest’s unprecedented data set presents new opportunities to build the next generation of search that’s personalized to each person on Pinterest,” Keller told VentureBeat.

Pinterest recently launched Lens feature, which facilitates image search through the live camera. This feature, currently available only on iOS, allows a user to point his/her camera towards any object — be it food, wearables, animals or geometric patterns, and instantly recognize what the same is. The user then has the option to conduct an internet search related to that product.