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Pinterest Search Box Goes Missing

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Tonia Ries | 22 Comments

When social media platforms become the latest shiny new thing, they often have trouble scaling to meet the demands of rapidly accelerating numbers of users.  Pinterest, the white-hot platform that has many marketers experimenting with visual curation, is no exception, with users reporting periodic outages over the last few weeks.

The site hasn’t yet added its own version of Twitter’s popular Fail Whale, but today users noticed that something had been taken down:  the Pinterest search box.  According to Pinterest user Maggie McGary, a friend noticed that the search function seemed to be hacked or broken yesterday, with all searches returning the same set of results.  Today, the search box is missing completely.

Pinterest without a search box

(To see a screen shot of the search box, check out Brankica’s post, Pinterest Traffic Generation SEO.)

Did the pressure of massive growth create a problem?  Or was the system hacked in some way?  Either way, tens of thousands of users–and a rapidly growing number of brands–are eagerly awaiting its return.

We’re working on getting more details on what happened & will update this post with any new developments.

UPDATE:  Here’s how Heidi Kay (@PediaStaff) described the problem she was seeing with Pinterest’s search functionality yesterday:

UPDATE 1/27:  this morning, the search box is back where it belongs!

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About the Author

Tonia Ries

Tonia is the founder of The Realtime Report, the host of the Realtime Conferences, and CEO of the Realtime Report’s parent company, Modern Media. When she’s not busy tweeting (@tonia_ries) or helping Modern Media clients innovate, she’s probably hanging out with her dog Milo. Tonia grew up in Germany and Belgium, and now lives in Montauk, New York.

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  • mammaloves

    @kamichat Glad I’m not the only who noticed. Just came to twitter to complain about its disappearance myself.

    • kamichat

      @mammaloves Great, we are not all crazy, now @pinterest has some explaining to do.

  • joewaters

    @NolandHoshino Yeah, what the hell is that about Pinterest and the search box? It’s like a ship without a compass.

    • NolandHoshino

      @joewaters Everyone wants to be a 35 yr old woman. I think that got too much traffic and crashed the site #Pinterest

  • Heidi Kay

    Thanks, Tonia for calling attention to Pinterest’s search bar going AWOL. There were several of us that thought that it may have been hacked. I am guessing they took it down to fix the damaged code or to secure it better. (I am not a techie so I am speculating, here) Pinterest posted on their twitter site that they took the search bar down to make updates. Incidentally, this is not the first time the search bar has been down. About a month ago (maybe six weeks?) the bar was down for several days after the site had started hanging up on big searches. I really shouldn’t be complaining at all. Pinterest is doing simply amazing things for our brand. PediaStaff is a placement firm specializing in pediatric and school-based speech language pathologists, occupational therapists and physical therapist. Our social media model is to X-post our blog entries (a combination of industry news, articles, therapy resources and treatment ideas), to our FB page, LinkedIn, Twitter and now Pinterest.

    What we love about Pinterest is that we can push so much more content to our target market than we can through any other outlet. I can’t post every idea we find on our blog, nor is it cool to tweet them all, but we can sure do it in Pinterest! Anyway, so so many people are finding us on Pinterest and are visiting our blog which we highlight very heavily on our Pinterest board. Pinterest is our number one referral by far now, outpacing our FB referrals 3 to 1 already. That said, we so many brands like ours getting excited about Pinterest and investing so much time in it, you would think the company would reach out to us better either in FAQs or a newsletter or whatnot to highlight how brands can make best use of the site, and even more importantly, what the parameters are for us. Yesterday, I discovered that we were no longer able to follow anyone else. We follow over 8300 and are followed by 8600 users. I sure wouldn’t think that they would think we were spammers, so I hope that’s not why we were cut off. Maybe there needs to be a certain ratio of followers to follows, like there is on Twitter. No explanation anywhere that would give me insight.

  • Heidi Kay

    (continued from previous post)

    We are trying to set up a discussion group where users discuss certain pins to see how they might modify the ideas they have found to achieve therapy goals. A requirement of a group board is that you need to follow anyone that you authorize as a collaborator on a board. I am not able to follow anyone else and so the project is stalled. I tried to unfollow a few to give me some “spare follows” and the system didn’t particularly care about that and I just lost those followers and couldn’t re-add others.

    As you see, we are trying to think outside the box on how to use the site and can’t really because there is a lack of communication. Pinterest ought to realize that brands like ours are eventually going to pay their bills when they move to a for profit model. You would think they would do a better job reaching out to us to give us guidance.

    Heidi Kay

    VP and CoFounder, PediaStaff, Inc

    http://www.pediastaff.com http://www.pediastaff.com/blog

    http://www.pinterest.com/pediastaff

  • Heidi Kay

    Thanks, Tonia for calling attention to Pinterest’s search bar going AWOL. There were several of us that thought that it may have been hacked. Incidentally, this is not the first time the search bar has been down. About a month ago the bar was down for several days after the site had started hanging up on big searches.

    I really shouldn’t be complaining at all. Pinterest is doing simply amazing things for our brand. Pinterest is our number one referral by far now, outpacing our FB referrals 3 to 1 already.

    That said, we so many brands like ours getting excited about Pinterest and investing so much time in it, you would think the company would reach out to us better either in FAQs or a newsletter or whatnot to highlight how brands can make best use of the site, and even more importantly, what the parameters are for us. Yesterday, I discovered that we were no longer able to follow anyone else. We follow over 8300 and are followed by 8600 users. I sure wouldn’t think that they would think we were spammers, so I hope that’s not why we were cut off. Maybe there needs to be a certain ratio of followers to follows, like there is on Twitter. No explanation anywhere that would give me insight.

    We are trying to set up a discussion group where users discuss certain pins to see how they might modify the ideas they have found to achieve therapy goals. A requirement of a group board is that you need to follow anyone that you authorize as a collaborator on a board. I am not able to follow anyone else and so the project is stalled. I tried to unfollow a few to give me some “spare follows” and the system didn’t particularly care about that and I just lost those followers and couldn’t re-add others.

    As you see, we are trying to think outside the box on how to use the site and can’t really because there is a lack of communication. Pinterest ought to realize that brands like ours are eventually going to pay their bills when they move to a for profit model. You would think they would do a better job reaching out to us to give us guidance.

    Heidi Kay

    VP and CoFounder, PediaStaff, Inc

    http://www.pediastaff.com http://www.pinterest.com/pediastaff

  • Heidi Kay

    Thanks, Tonia for calling attention to Pinterest’s search bar going AWOL. There were several of us that thought that it may have been hacked. Incidentally, this is not the first time the search bar has been down. About a month ago the bar was down for several days after the site had started hanging up on big searches.

    I really shouldn’t be complaining at all. Pinterest is doing simply amazing things for our brand. Pinterest is our number one referral by far now, outpacing our FB referrals 3 to 1 already.

    That said, we so many brands like ours getting excited about Pinterest and investing so much time in it, you would think the company would reach out to us better either in FAQs or a newsletter or whatnot to highlight how brands can make best use of the site, and even more importantly, what the parameters are for us. Yesterday, I discovered that we were no longer able to follow anyone else. We follow over 8300 and are followed by 8600 users. I sure wouldn’t think that they would think we were spammers, so I hope that’s not why we were cut off. Maybe there needs to be a certain ratio of followers to follows, like there is on Twitter. No explanation anywhere that would give me insight.

    We are trying to set up a discussion group where users discuss certain pins to see how they might modify the ideas they have found to achieve therapy goals. A requirement of a group board is that you need to follow anyone that you authorize as a collaborator on a board. I am not able to follow anyone else and so the project is stalled. I tried to unfollow a few to give me some “spare follows” and the system didn’t particularly care about that and I just lost those followers and couldn’t re-add others.

    As you see, we are trying to think outside the box on how to use the site and can’t really because there is a lack of communication. Pinterest ought to realize that brands like ours are eventually going to pay their bills when they move to a for profit model. You would think they would do a better job reaching out to us to give us guidance.

    Heidi Kay

    VP and CoFounder, PediaStaff, Inc

    http://www.pediastaff.com

    http://www.pinterest.com/pediastaff

  • Heidi Kay

    Thanks, Tonia for calling attention to Pinterest’s search bar going AWOL. There were several of us that thought that it may have been hacked. Incidentally, this is not the first time the search bar has been down. About a month ago the bar was down for several days after the site had started hanging up on big searches.

    I really shouldn’t be complaining at all. Pinterest is doing simply amazing things for our brand. Pinterest is our number one referrer by far now, outpacing our FB referrals 3 to 1 already.

    That said, with so many brands like ours getting excited about Pinterest and investing so much time in it, you would think the company would reach out to us better either in FAQs or a newsletter or whatnot to highlight how brands can make best use of the site, and even more importantly, what the parameters are for us. Yesterday, I discovered that we were no longer able to follow anyone else. We follow over 8300 and are followed by 8600 users. I sure wouldn’t think that they would think we were spammers, so I hope that’s not why we were cut off. Maybe there needs to be a certain ratio of followers to follows, like there is on Twitter. No explanation anywhere that would give me insight.

    We are trying to set up a discussion group where users discuss certain pins to see how they might modify the ideas they have found through pins to achieve therapy goals. A requirement of a group board on Pinterest is that you need to follow anyone that you authorize as a collaborator on a board. I am not able to follow anyone else and so the project is stalled. I tried to unfollow a few to give me some “spare follows” and the system didn’t particularly care about that and I just lost those followers and couldn’t re-add others.

    As you see, we are trying to think outside the box on how to use the site and can’t really because there is a lack of communication. Pinterest ought to realize that brands like ours are eventually going to pay their bills when they move to a for profit model. You would think they would do a better job reaching out to us to give us guidance.

    Heidi Kay

    VP and CoFounder, PediaStaff, Inc

    http://www.pediastaff.com

    http://www.pinterest.com/pediastaff

    • brelow

      @Heidi Kay Heidi, awesome post. I’ve heard of several brands who have had similar issues. Do you have a Twitter account? I’d love to connect.

      • Heidi Kay

        @brelow@Heidi Kay You bet! Its pediastaff I can also be reached at heidi at pediastaff dot com

    • http://therealtimereport.com/ tonia_ries

      @Heidi Kay Heidi – really appreciate you taking the time to share your insights. The PediaStaff boards are amazing — I’m not surprised you’ve seen so much interest and traffic — and really hope the pinterest team can address some of these issues quickly!

  • reeltake

    I was wondering where the search box went! Glad it wasn’t only me @tonia_ries @RealtimeReport | #Pinterest http://t.co/1f3EPItH

  • NolandHoshino

    @AllisonnTweets Hope they fix it soon or else I might be forced to get some work done today cc @Pinterest

  • MollyOberhausen

    I am having the weirdest Pinterest issue where when I go to the home page I get redirected to this page called Ghost in the Shellcode… anyone else have this issue? It looks like a hacker page- but it hasn’t done anything to my OS, nor has it affected any page but the homepage of Pinterest

    • http://therealtimereport.com/ tonia_ries

      @MollyOberhausen Hi Molly – it’s not happening for me. If you figure out what was causing the problem, let us know!

  • Uomo241

    @giuliomagnifico
    Grazie per la segnalazione…
    :-)

  • Uomo241

    @giuliomagnifico
    a me funziona male, quando carico nella bacheca Design,le immagini non vengono caricate nella board principale “Design” :(

    • giuliomagnifico

      @Uomo241 non ho capito… Non si vedono le immagini? Non c’è una bacheca principale, ci sono solo le singole boards e la timeline.

      • Uomo241

        @giuliomagnifico
        ora sembra andare…. tutto ok! scusa per il disturbo….
        ;)

      • Uomo241

        @giuliomagnifico
        e no… ti confermo che il servizio è veramente pessimo salvo in una board e la ritrovo altrove….

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