Instagram brings search functionality to their browser experience, finally

That de facto square crop is today synonymous with all things Instagram. Being the go-to app for people even remotely interested in sharing via photographs, Instagram has been known for doggedly holding on to its roots of being an app-first experience.

All of that started changing gradually when they opened up access to the service via their website, but not being able to search on the site effectively muted the experience, resulting in only passive browsing abilities for desktop users.

All of that has now changed; Instagram has finally added the ability to deep search their image stream, including results from hashtags, user profiles and locations. The search is real-time: as you type in the search term into the conveniently located filed at top-center, a drop down list appears with matching entries listed, each with an icon indicating one of the three result types.

Clicking a matching hashtag or geotag takes you to a landing page showing search results segregated by top posts and recent entries. Scrolling to the bottom of the page leads to a ‘Load more’ button that pulls up more and more matches.

We found there were a few stray discrepancies in the search results where the images that showed up didn’t quite match the query, indicating results being based purely on user-generated data and not a more advanced image recognition approach.

With search now enabled on their desktop website, Instagram is clearly taking definitive steps towards being a cross-platform service.