Yandex Search Supports World Standards

Internet, August 15, 2008. During the summer of 2008 Yandex search added international data exchange formats Sitemaps, GZIP, MediaRSS and FOAF to XML, RSS and Atom it already supported. The new Yandex search functionality allows better and faster indexing of "fast content" oriented websites like media websites, social network services, multimedia hosting services etc.

Four of Yandex's search services show difference in speed and depth of website crawling: web search, picture search, video search and blog search services. The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform Yandex how often pages on a website get updated and which ones should be indexed first. The GZIP protocol allows reduce data exchange traffic between a website and the Yandex crawler. MediaRSS is liked by multimedia owners who can promptly inform Yandex.Images and Yandex.Video about new pictures or videos on their websites. The FOAF (friend of a friend) standard makes blog search or social network search deeper and more accurate, in particular, it allows searching friend feeds and user profiles.

At the moment, about 200,000 websites in the Russian internet support the Sitemaps standard. The MediaRSS format is used on a number of multimedia hosting services, such as YouTube. All the largest blog hosting services in the Russian internet including Livejournal.com, Liveinternet.ru and Blogs.Mail.ru, represent user profiles in the FOAF format.