Google announced the launch of Keen – a machine learning app that actively promotes relevant web pages to users. It is basically a content discovery service and many times referred to as a Pinterest competitor – but that may not be exactly accurate. Keen is actually poised to become one of the newest sources of referral traffic and let’s find out exactly what it does and can do.

What exactly is Keen?

As a part of Google’s Area 120 projects, Keen is an experimental web and Android App. Area 120 is essentially, small teams at Google that work together on experimental projects to bring innovative projects to life. Google shared that this project was inspired by a story of a husband and wife sharing information about their activities and interests that were important to them and wished to share with each other. They began sharing information and links to resources that were related to their hobbies and goals. This gave rise to the thought that there needs to be a place where people can find and store and share curated information about the activities that were important to them.

Keen was developed as a part of this idea – where curated content can be shared with friends, family and public.

Now, what sets Keen apart from Pinterest?

Many say it’s an attempt to be like Pinterest – but what makes Keen different is that it used machine learning to help create content that is related to an individual’s topic of interest. As the curated collection grows Google search becomes more and better at surfacing content that the user is actually interested in. It is a proactive content discovery method unlike Pinterest where user first searches and then pins the information. Everything you add to Keen you get more to explore!

Keen as a new channel for traffic

Keen is already being seen as a new opportunity for traffic. The most powerful recommendation is that of a friend and the most powerful marketing is the word of mouth (or shared content by friend). Keen represents a new way for users to discover web content. Keen actively searches for content. In a normal search engine, the search is passive and reactive – it reacts to the searches entered by users – but Keen actively searches and suggests relevant content to users. This is far more than a competitor to Pinterest – it’s a way to grow traffic and popularity. Businesses can explore its potential to see how it can fit in the marketing strategies.

Keen is a whole new way of exploring ML for marketing – until further updates, we can check out its current offerings!gh

Image Credit Source: Google.com