With a solid 300 million users, Instagram has been working on making the mass amount of content shared on its platform more accessible and easily searched. They recently released a major update to the Search and Explore page of the app that will make in-app discovery much friendlier for users.

Explore the Unexplored

Instagram’s enhanced Explore feature seems to be the platform’s response to Project Lightning (Twitter) and Stories (Snapchat). With the new update, Instagram users will be able to tap into curated collections featuring live updates from trending places, people, and tags. According to the New York Times, this update “will show users the most important photos from events and places in their regions and across the country, as determined by the service’s algorithms.”

Insta-Searching Now Powerful

With the new Places search, users can now see geo-tagged images when searching for a particular location. In addition to this, the Top search now allows users to search across people, places, and tags all at once. This feature should make it easier to find photos posted that are related to any topic and will display the top posts for the specific search item followed by recent posts.

Do you think Instagram’s exciting new changes are for the better as they try to become more competitive with Twitter? Let us know in the comments!