Russian search giant Yandex introduced the beta version of a new search service yesterday, displaying search results from social network content in a more ordered and convenient way – and a step ahead of Google’s.
As before, Yandex’s search results display the public profiles of people with accounts on the country’s popular social networks, from Vkontakte.ru to Odnoklassniki.ru to Facebook, as well as to the blogging platform LiveJournal. But if multiple profiles exist for the same person, the new service groups them together in the search results. According to project manager Alexander Chubinskiy, “Yandex does this grouping with care – only those profiles that refer to one another get grouped.”
If more than one personal profile matches the user’s search query, Yandex adds one of the profiles to the top of its search results page and shows all others on a separate page.
Yandex also features search options such as age, location and workplace to help refine search results quickly.
Most of the two million people searches that Yandex processes daily relate to celebrities or a user’s friend, contact, employee or partner, Yandex maintains. The company claims it has indexed some 250 million personal profile pages hosted on various blogging platforms and social networks.
“We aren’t in competition with anyone in the field of social networking, we seek cooperation with all players,” the Social Internet Search team says on the Yandex corporate blog.
Established as a web search engine in 1997, Yandex has developed online services in almost all directions except social networking, a field dominated by Mail.ru Group, Yandex’s chief rival on the Russian Internet scene.
