It goes without saying that Instagram is huge – and I mean it quite literally. The Facebook-owned image-sharing site is everyone’s home and home to tens of billions of images online. The problem is that with this kind of volume, it can be difficult to find what you’re looking for if you’re after something specific. For all the Instagram newbies out there, I’m going to discuss how to search Instagram. I’ll explain the basics of searching so you can find what you’re looking for, without dedicating your life to looking at pictures on this addictive social network.
search on Instagram
Instagram has a built-in search function. To search using this feature, simply tap the magnifying glass icon in the app or type your search term in the search box at the top of the screen on the desktop site. You will have the option to search by People (i.e. searching their names), Tags (searching hashtags assigned to images), and Places (searching for place names). Simply type the name of the person, hashtag or place you are looking for; Instagram will do a search.
Recommended users
While not strictly searching, you can find Instagram users by allowing the system to suggest. This is a good way to find random or relevant people to follow on Instagram.
- Go to Discover People outside of the profile page. Tap the menu icon in the top menu bar – it’s a small + symbol next to a person’s picture.
- On the Discover People page, select Suggested users.
- Scroll until you find someone interesting, tap the profile link, then tap Follow.
How helpful these suggested users will be depends on who you are currently friends with and how much you allow Instagram to integrate into your life. The more friends or contacts you have, the more diverse the suggested users will be. Some will be company and others will be seemingly random people, but most will be regular friends of your friends or people your friends follow.
Use an Instagram search website
The built-in tools are good, but many people found they needed more precision in their searches. If neither of these two methods work for you, you can try a third-party website that provides search for Instagram. If you’ve tried the browser version of Instagram, you’ve probably noticed that it’s not that good. The network does everything it can for you to use the mobile app, and therefore web pages are complex by design. Searching the website has opened up the market for third-party search solution websites.
Some are better than others but there is a couple that works well. One of them is Websta, a website designed for social media marketers to do analytics. Since one way to use Instagram is to follow influencers, it provides a good search function to find them.
Search using hashtags
People tag images with #hashtags, just like on other social media websites. This is in part so that the poster can organize their own images, but mainly the function of tags is that anyone can search for targeted images. A very clever crowdsourced way of being able to quickly search for something using a keyword format.
Hashtags work by prefixing something with the ‘#’ that old-fashioned programmers would recognize as the “hash” symbol. For example, if I visit the Empire State Building and take a photo from the top, I might tag it with ‘#EmpireState’. This tells everyone about the subject of the image and makes the image appear when anyone searches for the Empire State Building. You can add any hashtag to any image. Spend five minutes searching for hashtags and you’ll quickly see that people are tagging their images with all sorts of hashtags, some correct and some not, just to get them seen. So while it’s an efficient way to organize and search images, no one has set up Hashtag Police to do quality control. So be careful what you are looking for!
Searching Instagram isn’t exactly intuitive and is more difficult than it should be on the web. But that hasn’t stopped the social network from building a massive following of millions of people who take pictures of everything they see on their travels. If you have the patience, it is definitely a network worth your time.