Today, Imgur began rolling out an update for its search tool that’s poised to take Imgur from being just a site to upload and share images, to a place where people can go to find the Internet’s hottest images,
Imgur’s new search tool uses a system of tags that users can add to an image when they upload it. From there, anyone can add new tags and vote on the relevancy of the tags that have already been added.
For those unfamiliar with Imgur, it has already gained plenty of traction in amongst certain niches of web users. 1.5 million images are uploaded to Imgur every day, bringing in over 5 billion page views from more than 130 million unique visitors every month.
The bulk of Imgur’s traffic comes from people sharing images on social networks or uploading images to sites like Reddit. There’s not a lot of incentive to browse Imgur on it’s own, which is something the company is trying to change.
VentureBeat reports that Imgur founder Alan Schaaf wants Imgur search to be a way for people to find the most viral images for any category.
With Imgur’s new tagging and search tool you can browse through categories of viral images, updated in real time, and create your own custom galleries.
For example, if you’re still pumped up from the previous night’s episode of The Walking Dead, you’ll be able to use Imgur search to find the hottest new images of The Walking Dead .
Conversely, you can also use the custom galleries to filter out certain tags from your search. Let’s say you missed the latest episode of The Walking Dead and don’t want to be spoiled, you can filter out anything related to The Walking Dead while browsing through the day’s collection of viral memes.
You will also be able to search for images by file type, size, title, and so on. However, Schaaf stated to VentureBeat that Imgur isn’t intended to be your new go-to tool for finding general image. “If you want to find a general image of something, you should go to Google Image Search,” said Schaaf.
To start browsing through the hottest viral images and memes, just go to the Imgur homepage and click on the search bar at the top.