Yandex Search () is a search engine owned by the company Yandex, based in Russia. In January 2015, Yandex Search generated 51.2% of all of the search traffic in Russia according to .
In February 2024, Yandex N.V. announced the sale of the majority of its Russia-based assets to a consortium of Russia-based investors. In July 2024, the sale was completed, giving the Kremlin more control over the business.
About The search technology provides local search results in more than 1,400 cities. Yandex Search also features "parallel" search that presents results from both main web index and specialized information resources, including news, shopping, blogs, images and videos on a single page.
Yandex Search is responsive to real-time queries, recognizing when a query requires the most current information, such as breaking news or the most recent post on Twitter on a particular topic. It also contains some additional features: Wizard Answer, which provides additional information (for example, sports results), spell checker, autocomplete which suggests queries as-you-type, antivirus that detects malware on webpages and so on.
In May 2010, Yandex launched Yandex.com, a platform for beta testing and improving non-Russian language search.Matt McGee, Search Engine Land. Russia’s Yandex Search Engine Goes Global . Retrieved 2011-04-30.
The search product can be accessed from personal computers, mobile phones, tablets and other digital devices. In addition to web search, Yandex provides a wide range of specialized search services.
In 2009, Yandex launched MatrixNet, a new method of machine learning that significantly improves the relevance of search results. It allows Yandex's search engine to take into account a very large number of factors when it makes the decision about relevancy of search results.MatrixNet: New Level of Search Quality . Retrieved 2011-04-30.
Another technology, Spectrum, was launched in 2010. It allows inferring implicit queries and returning matching search results. The system automatically analyses users' searches and identifies objects like personal names, films or cars. Proportions of the search results responding to different user intents are based on the user demand for these results.
With the first release on 21 July 2017, Brave web browser features Yandex as one of its default search engines.
In March 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Yandex and Mail.ru were removed as optional search providers from the Mozilla Firefox browser.
Functionality
Overview The search engine consists of three main components:
An agent is a search robot. It bypasses the network, downloads and analyzes documents. If a new link is found during site analysis, it falls into the list of web addresses of the robot. Search robots are of the following types: spiders - download sites like the user's browsers; Crawler - discover new, still unknown links based on the analysis of already known documents; indexers - analyze the detected web pages and add data to the index. Many deflated documents are divided into disjoint parts and are cleared from the markup. Index is a database compiled by search engine indexing robots. Documents are searched in the index. Search engine. The search request from the user is sent to the least loaded server after analyzing the load of the search system. To provide such an opportunity, Yandex servers are clustered. Then, the user request is processed by a program called "Metapoisk". Metapoisk analyzes the request in real time: it determines the geographic location of the user, conducts linguistic analysis, etc. The program also determines whether the request belongs to the category of the most popular or recently defined.The issuance of such requests for some time is stored in the memory (cache) of the metasearch, and in case of a match, previously saved results are displayed. If the request is rare and there are no matches in the cache, the system redirects it to the Basic Search program. It analyzes the system index, which is also divided into different duplicate servers (this speeds up the procedure). Then the received information again falls into meta-search, the data is ranked and shown to the user in a final form.
Indexing In general, Yandex indexes the following file types: html, pdf, rtf, doc, xls, ppt, docx, odt, odp, ods, odg, xlsx, pptx.
The search engine is also able to index text inside Shockwave Flash objects (if the text is not placed on the image itself), if these elements are transferred as a separate page, which has the MIME type application/x-shockwave-flash, and files with the extension .swf
Yandex has 2 scanning robots - the “main” and the “fast”. The first is responsible for the whole Internet, the second indexes sites with frequently changing and updating information (news sites and news agencies). In 2010, the “fast” robot received a new technology called “Orange”, developed jointly by the California and Moscow divisions of Yandex.
Since 2009, Yandex has supported Sitemaps technology.
Server logs In the server logs, Yandex robots are represented as follows:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0) is the main indexing bot. Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; MirrorDetector) - a bot that detects site mirrors. If there are several sites with the same content, only one will be shown in the search results. Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexImages/3.0) - Yandex image indexer Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexVideo/3.0) - Yandex video indexer Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexMedia/3.0) - multimedia data indexer Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBlogs/0.99; robot) is a search bot that indexes post comments. Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexAddurl/2.0) - is a search bot that indexes pages through the "Add URL" form. Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexDirect/2.0; Dyatel) - checks Yandex Direct Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexMetrika/2.0) - Yandex Metrics indexer Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexCatalog/3.0; Dyatel) - checks Yandex Catalog Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexNews/3.0) - Yandex News indexer Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexAntivirus/2.0) - Yandex anti-virus bot
Query language
The following operators are used for setting:
"" - exact quote | - enter between words, if you need to find one of them * - enter between words, if some word is missing site: - search on a specific site date: - search for documents by date, for example, date: 2007 + - enter before the word, that should be in the document
Search results Yandex automatically, along with the original "exact form" of the query, searches for its various variations and formulations.
The Yandex search takes into account the morphology of the Russian language, therefore, regardless of the form of the word in the search query, the search will be performed for all word forms. If morphological analysis is undesirable, one can put an exclamation mark (!) Before the word — the search in this case will show only the specific form of the word. In addition, the search query practically does not take into account the so-called stop-words, that is, prepositions, punctuation, pronouns, etc., due to their wide distribution
As a rule, abbreviations are automatically disclosing, spelling is correcting. It also searches for synonyms (mobile - cellular). The extension of the original user request depends on the context. Expansion does not occur when a set of highly specialized terms, names of proper names of companies (for example, OJSC “Hippo” - OJSC “Hippopotamus”), adding the word “price”, in exact quotes (these are queries highlighted with typewriter quotes).
Search results for each user are formed individually based on their location, language of a query, interests and preferences based on the results of previous and current search sessions. However, the key factor in ranking search results is their relevance to the search query. Relevance is determined based on a ranking formula, which is constantly updated based on machine learning algorithms.
The search is performed in Russian, English, French, German, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Tatar, Kazakh.
Search results can be sorted by relevance and by date (buttons below the search results).
The page with the search results consists of 10 links with short annotations - “snippets”. The snippets includes a text comment, link, address, popular sections of the site, pages on social networks, etc. As an alternative to snippets, Yandex introduced in 2014 a new interface called “Islands”.
Yandex implements the “parallel searches” mechanism, when together with a web search, a search is performed on Yandex services, such as Catalog, News, Market, Encyclopedias, Images, etc. As a result, in response to a user's request, the system shows not only textual information, but also links to video files, pictures, dictionary entries, etc.
A distinctive feature of the search engine is also the technology of "intent search" that mean a search for solving a problem. Intent search elements are - dialog prompts in case of ambiguous request, automatic text translation, information about the characteristics of the requested car, etc. For example, when you request “Boris Grebenshchikov - Golden City”, the system will show a form for online listening to music from the Yandex Music service, at the request of "st. Koroleva 12 " will be shown a fragment of the map with the marked object on it.
Promotion of misinformation and propaganda
Search results from the Yandex search engine tend to favor Russian media sources, including state media, and Yandex-delivered ads tend to promote misinformation and propaganda produced by more than half a dozen Russian-language news sites.
One study found that Yandex-delivered adverts ran alongside false stories about US bioweapons labs in Ukraine, claims that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a drug user, and reports repeating Kremlin claims that the war against Ukraine is going entirely to plan. Other fake news promoted by Yandex ads referred to the Russian invasion by using Kremlin talking points, calling the war an “operation to denazify and demilitarise Ukraine”. Another analysis found that Yandex directs Russian speakers worldwide to manipulated information and often to outright disinformation.
Spam and virus protection In 2013, Yandex was considered by some to be the safest search engine at the time and the third most secure among all web resources. By 2016, Yandex had slipped down to third with Google being first.