Yandex Injects Semantics
January 14, 2011
The Russian search engine Yandex is trying to pull a Google. Yandex’s new search engine has been dubbed “Spectrum” for it’s ability to “read” your mind. Spectrum uses a machine learning program that uses your previous searches as well as historic search patterns to infer what it is that you’d like on your search return.
“As users’ interests and intents tend to change, the system performs query analysis several times a week”, says Yandex. This amounts to Spectrum analyzing about five billion search queries.
For example, if most people who search “gone with the wind” are searching for the movie Gone With the Wind, then the majority of results will be about the movie instead of the book. If they can pull it off Russia will have a search engine to rival even the best in the world.
Yandex may pose a threat to Google in certain markets. There is considerable chatter about the Google Microsoft Web search face off. We think the real action is among Google and Baidu and Yandex. The Russian and Chinese markets are big, but it may be easier to Google’s Russian and Chinese competitors to attach Google on its home turf than for Google to put pressure on Baidu and Yandex in their back yards.
Stephen E Arnold, January 14, 2011
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2 Responses to “Yandex Injects Semantics”
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Interesting. What about search in other BIG markets such as India (with English plus dozens of major & minor languages), Indonesia, and Japan? I admit to knowing next to nothing about those markets.
Re: “it may be easier to Google’s Russian and Chinese competitors to attach Google on its home turf than for Google to put pressure on Baidu and Yandex in their back yards.”: Google is already putting pressure on Baidu. Google already has a 25% share of China Net searches (http://www.china.org.cn/business/2010-12/08/content_21500028.htm).
Seth
[…] approaches still work (although thankfully, their effect seems to be more and more temporal). Yandex Injects Semantics Beyond Search: Russian Yandex’s new search engine has been dubbed ‘Spectrum’ for […]