Snapchat has opened up search across over 1 million curated public Stories, with a new feature release that could be a very helpful tool not only for users, but for advertisers, too. The search feature allows users to find Stories relevant to their interest by keyword, from a large number shared publicly by users and brands.

The Stories search is built on new tech behind the scenes that uses machine learning to identify whats happening in Stories submitted to the networks Our Story feature, and to organize it by keyword accordingly. This can identify elements shared in thestory by either elements of the image, or by words included in captions.

This new feature will roll out to the broader Snapchat community in pieces: Today, its coming to just a few select cities at launch, with gradual introduction to additional locales planned from there.

A search function should help with user stickiness: The ability to easily find content youre interested in should result in longer time spent in-app among users. Its also likely to help with advertiser targeting; adding a search function opens up tons of opportunities for targeted advertising products in the future, including promoted Stories specific to certain keywords and queries.

To be clear, no ads are currently set to run on the Stories collections appearing in the new Search results, but its an interesting opportunity for the company in the future.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/31/snapchat-now-lets-you-search-across-over-1-million-stories/