Instagram Search

[manassolanki]

• [ ]

[suranah]

We explored this in some depth. Here are some key findings:

Twitter-like free-form Search

• Search on Instagram is largely driven by hashtags. There is no way to arbitrarily search of post captions or messages like on Twitter. Please see: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/guides/hashtag-search/
• Full hashtags for what we are looking for yield almost no results.
• There are some features for a more free form search added recently. Though on testing it also maps to a set of pre-defined keywords. Again our kind of queries does not yield any matched keywords. See this for more details:
  https://www.engadget.com/instagram-keyword-search-193500641.html

Surfacing verified handles

• The other set of options is to find verified folks and search for hashtags they use. This will also vary by each user. But in the broadest scenario, we can surface all verified folks.
• This needs more user testing across users as Instagram search behaves differently than Twitter/Google-like searches.

Instagram crawler

• The last option would be to build our own DB by crawling Instagram.
• Writing Instagram crawlers from scratch can be time-consuming, so we can use external services for crawling (like https://social-spider.com) or social listening (i.e. https://brand24.com or https://sproutsocial.com)
• All these services will require pre-setting the set of keywords/ hashtags we are looking for.
• My past experience with social listening services has been that they work to an extent but would not provide an exhaustive list of third party posts.