Ask HN: Does Pinterest have a future in search?

Over the holidays I had an opportunity to listen to a discussion between a few teachers of various ages, trying to describe how useful Pinterest is to them in both their personal and professional lives. The words they used to describe Pinterest are what fascinated me. "I use it to find ____", and "Just search for ____ and you'll get something great". In their own descriptions, this was a resource for discovery and search, rather than simply consumption. Furthermore, they talked a lot about the sharing aspect, "When I find something great, I will share it". In my own experience with the site, the search functionality hasn't been great, and it's not a big surprise either. The community hasn't been encouraged to describe the posts with keywords the way that Twitter and Instagram do. Rather than describing things as "Light Blue Paint Interior", posts are often described with a reaction to the image "I really love the colors!". I've always seen Pinterest as just a visual bookmarking tool with sharing involved. But it now seems to me that Pinterest is becoming a leading social visual search engine. Although the social aspect of the site is well developed and intuitive, I'm starting to see a massive opportunity for Pinterest to improve the search engine aspects of their site. This could be effectively done by introducing functional hashtags (hyperlinked to search, like Twitter) to the site, which would likely be an instant hit with the community due to the pre-selected categories being too general. Further advanced search tools might also be useful, such as searching based on a specific color, specific domains, or advanced search syntax (AND, NOT, etc.).