Yandex: Adding Video Services, Keeping the GOOG at Bay

July 9, 2008

Russian search engine group Yandex has launched the public beta of Yandex.Video. Service users can search and share videos clips online, as well as view the most popular videos. See an article about it here (http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=626524).

Yandex.Video currently searches about twenty video hosting services including youtube.com, rutube.ru, video.mail.ru, smotri.com and myvi.ru. The service’s video search method is based on analysis of names, tags, descriptions and other video clip attributes. Search results are ranked according to user ratings.

Yandex.Video continuously updates the most popular videos shown on its front page, as it receives information about new comments and new videos posted in blogs from Yandex’s Blog Search service. Service users can upload an unlimited amount of video files and create their own favorite lists. The service currently indexes over 2 million videos. Yandex is a portal with a wide variety of services, including the ubiquitous text search.

Yandex search software offers a set of tools for full-text indexing and text data search “understanding” Russian and English language morphology. Beyond that, Yandex mirrors search portals like Google and Yahoo! by including things like images search, latest news and weather, maps, free mail, free web hosting, Yandex.Money (like Paypal) and much, much more. There’s a much more complete list in this article at The Search Engine Journal. (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yandex-russian-search-engine-spotlight-4/2157/)

That article also says “Given Yandex’s vast offering of services along with WiFi, RSS Search, and a pay system; sounds like it’s a model for Google and Yahoo to follow in terms of network building.” Sounds like to me it would also be a good buy for a company looking to catch up to Google. Yandex has a diverse number of pieces parts in its repetoire, content that would be costly to reproduce. Why reinvent the wheel? Just buy it in Russian.

Jessica Bratcher, July 9, 2008

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Online (general), Search

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.