Keen by Google - The Smarter Alternative to Pinterest by Search Giant

Keen is the latest Android and Web app launched by Google to give users a treasure trove of curated content as per their interest to share them and create communities with similar interests. 

The latest content discovery app is powered by Machine Learning algorithms and actively suggests websites to users based on their areas of interest.

While headlines are being written as Keen being Google’s alternative to Pinterest, in reality, the app has much more to offer. It is yet another AI product by Google to garner more traffic.

What is Keen?

The Keen Concept

Keen is an Area 120 project output. Area 120 is Google’s counterpart of small teams that work together much like startups to give life to innovative projects.

Keen is said to have developed out of a couple’s interest and initiative to share more information about their individual persuasions and what they wanted to share with one another.

They collected resources and links pertaining to their interest. While doing so, they understood the importance of having a tool that would allow them to explore more of such ideas and share them with one another. 

This is what Cj Adams, the key developer of Keen, wrote in his inaugural blog post published on June 18th, 2020 titled, “Want to share your passion with the world? Get Keen:”

“It was powerful to tell each other what we wanted to spend more time on. And once we did, we found that collecting related ideas, links and resources together gave us a way to spend more time on our shared passions in real life.

To explore this idea further, four colleagues and I created a new experiment called Keen as part of Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects. We worked in close collaboration with a team at Google called People and AI Research (PAIR), dedicated to human-centered Machine Learning systems, to develop this experiment.”

The app as it stands today can be used to share curated content with select people, made public or kept totally private.

It uses the smart Machine Learning technology to look for content on Google Search related to the Googler’s interest. With an increase in content collection, the app uses ML algorithms to suggest more content that you as a user may be interested in.

While Google Search gives you result only when you make a query input, Keen uses ML to proactively look for content that is related to your areas of interest. 

How Google Keen Works

Once you download the app, you are requested to start your profile using your Google account. You’re presented with a grid of general topics that you can explore.

Moving on, you can save a topic of your interest, where each topic is what you’re “keen” on! You can also create new “keens” or topics based on your interest by going into the option provided. 

When done, there is a list of suggestions that you can choose from and save as your “keen by tapping on the gem icon below it.” You have the option of sharing your “keen” via a host of social media and other modes with others.

It is at this stage that Keen ML algorithms come alive and give you more link suggestions on the topic related to your interest. The content in your Keen are just starters that enable the algorithms to come up with more links related to your search.

When you create a “keen,” you have the options to Explore, Save, and Search. So if you’re interested in Meditative Music, you can populate your board with content by adding hashtags, users, or with a simple search.

Adding a few tags to your search related to specialized areas of your interest lets Keen ML auto-generate a board that you would be interested in pursuing.

In fact, it’s a treasure house of everything that you’re interested in a life without you having to spend hours making the search on different platforms.

You can also follow “keen” created by others to broaden the collection and form your own community getting alerts when others add new links.

How is Keen different from Pinterest

Keen is not Google’s own version of Pinterest. It is smarter as it uses Google Search and its Machine Learning algorithms to look for related content. It lets you save and organize content systematically with it becoming a recommendation to others.

Google Keen: A New Channel for Digital Traffic

Keen offers users “more to explore” and this is precisely what is going to help bring in more traffic to the entire web ecosystem. The best recommendations are those that come from peers and Keen helps doing just that when users share their “keen” with one another. 

Going beyond being a passive search engine, Keen not just responds to queries but also actively suggests relevant content for users to enjoy. This is how the app helps grow website traffic and popularity.

It’s time for Digital Marketers to create “Keens” and attract more traffic as part of their Digital Marketing strategies.