Building Your Own Instagram Discovery Engine: A Step-By-Step Tutorial

Instagram's "Explore" section uses a variety of factors to personalize content for its users, such as timing, engagement, previous interactions, and affinity. The detailed explanation of Instagram's algorithm considers these elements to curate content that aligns with users' preferences and social connections. The blog post provides a step-by-step guide on creating a similar discovery engine using Python, the unofficial Instagram API by Pasha Lev, and graph visualization tools like Graphistry. It involves analyzing social networks and calculating personalized pagerank scores to identify relevant images from users' immediate and extended networks. The article also explores interest-based analysis using hashtags, suggesting improvements like incorporating click data and image features through Convolutional Neural Nets to enhance the discovery engine's accuracy. While the post is outdated, it still offers insights into building personalized content feeds and suggests ways to integrate various data points for a more refined user experience.