Russian online search giant Yandex has launched a new search platform, implementing personalized search for users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Starting from today, Yandex search users will receive results according to their interests, which will be determined based on “their online behaviour including their search history, clicks on search results and their language preferences,” the company explained.
The main motive behind the introduction of the ‘Kaliningrad’ platform with personalized search is to bring users better results when they’re using similar keywords. For instance, a book lover looking for ‘Hobbit’ will get more references to the book, while a user deep into movies will receive mostly news about its screen version.
According to Denis Rogachevsky, lead developer for Personalised Search at Yandex, this approach “improves the quality of search results for about 75-80% search queries.”
Search personalization is enabled by default for every active user of Yandex Search in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Turkey will also receive this feature, though the exact date is unknown yet.
In Russia, Yandex is the clear leader in online search with a share of 60.2%, while in the other three countries it accounts for 27% to 38% of the market. Fighting for the market share, the company recently announced its own browser and partnered with Microsoft to become the default search engine in Windows Phone 8 smartphones in Russia, CIS states and Turkey.
Personalized search is not something invented yesterday, but every implementation of it is usually claimed to be the best one. Google introduced its Personalized Search back in 2009, while Bing’s Adaptive Search went public in 2011.
Image credit: Andrew Michaels / Flickr.
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