New Personalised Search on Yandex

Internet, May 30, 2013. Yandex (NASDAQ:YNDX) has upgraded its Personalised Search. Now, when fetching search results and delivering search suggestions, the Yandex search engine takes into consideration not only a user’s long-term interests, but also short-term ones – those within the current search session. A football fan searching for [Manchester] will firstly be offered results about the city rather than the football club, if his current search intent is to read aboutEnglish cities. The upgraded Personalised Search is based on a new search program called Dublin.

Until now, Yandex updated its knowledge of users’ interests once a day. This allowed it to take into account long-term interests, such as a love of football, as well as more temporary ones, such as wallpaper when the user is renovating. Now the search engine is also able to respond to fleeting interests that pass soon after they arise. A large proportion of users’ search queries on Yandex – more than half – are motivated by such short-term interests. To take these interests into consideration, Yandex analyses search sessions in real time, which means that a user’s search queries begin to influence search results within seconds. Right from the beginning of a session the search engine can now figure out whether a person is looking for a book or a film when they type [Anna Karenina] in the search box.

The new version of Personalised Search works for all users. Even when a newcomer is using Yandex for the first time and has only entered a couple of queries, the search engine is already tailoring its answers to his or her interests. Yandex has created a real-time data processing system, which enables it to instantaneously react to changes in users’ search behavior. This system processes more than 10 terabytes of data a day, continuously correcting its knowledge of users’ needs.

For several years Yandex has been working on making search results more personalised. First it released the program Reykjavík, delivering search results based on users’ language preferences. With the launch of Kaliningrad, the next version of the company’s search program, the search engine adapted to user’s ongoing interests. As of today, Yandex has the capability to take into account even momentary search interests of its users.

More information about Yandex’s Persoalised Search on the company blog and in Products and Technologies on the company website.

Contact:
Media Relations
Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com