Last month Yandex announced two enhancements to its in-house browser. The first one is the integration of Zen, a personalized content recommendation technology developed by the Russian search giant, into the browser.
This AI-based recommendation technology uses Yandex’s considerable global web index to pick stories, images, videos and other content for each individual user. Presented as a content discovery feed, Zen delivers recommendations based on the user’s location, browsing history, their viewing history and preferences in Zen, “among hundreds of other factors,” Yandex claims.
“With all the vastness of information available on the internet, something genuinely interesting isn’t easy to come by. Zen helps solving this problem,” says Victor Lamburt, head of Yandex Zen.
Zen uses natural language processing and computer vision to understand the verbal and visual content on the pages the user has viewed, liked or disliked, to offer them the content they are likely to like.
Yandex says that Zen is taking advantage of another Yandex recommendation technology, named ‘Disco,’ which is based on the company’s machine-learning algorithm, MatrixNet. Disco helps Zen choose which suggestions to offer to the user at any given point in time.
“Targeted to identify the user’s personal long-term interests and cater to them, Zen also delivers content not directly related to their immediate preferences. The more the user interacts with Zen, the better are the chances that they will see serendipitously interesting content,” the Russian company explains.
Yandex says that this personal content recommendation technology can be easily integrated into third-party mobile applications, such as browsers or launcher apps. “There is a great monetization potential here for OEMs, app developers, and mobile carriers,” according to Yandex.
Against “aggressive and malicious advertising”
Another new feature relates to third-party ad-blocking extensions, which are now supported in the Android version of the Russian browser. In addition, Yandex has released an API for developers of content filtering software.
“We want our users to feel comfortable online, but some forms of advertising hinder that,” said Yandex Browser head Roman Ivanov. “Banner ads sometimes masquerade as interface elements or hover over the page so that they cannot be closed. Yandex’s own ad-blocking technology, built into Yandex Browser, automatically blocks aggressive and malicious advertising, but now we are taking it a step further by starting to support other ad-blocking extensions.”
Third-party ad blockers currently supported by Yandex Browser include Adguard AdBlocker and AdBlock Fast. Developers of other Android extensions can use the new Content Blocker API to ensure compatibility with Yandex Brower.
Yandex claims that its browser for Android is Russia’s most popular downloadable mobile browser. Its daily user audience currently amounts to some five million. It is available for desktop computers, iPads, iPhones, smartphones and tablet devices.
The Yandex browser was launched in 2012. Last year the company introduced several new features, including rich search suggestions and an enhanced privacy protection system.
Earlier this year, Yandex updated its browser to include a built-in domain name system protection feature – DNSCrypt.
