Yandex Incorporates Semantic Search
March 15, 2017
Apparently ahead of a rumored IPO launch, Russian search firm Yandex is introducing “Spectrum,” a semantic search feature. We learn of the development from “Russian Search Engine Yandex Gets a Semantic Injection” at the Association of Internet Research Specialists’ Articles Share pages. Writer Wushe Zhiyang observes that, though Yandex claims Spectrum can read users’ minds, the tech appears to be a mix of semantic technology and machine learning. He specifies:
The system analyses users’ searches and identifies objects like personal names, films or cars. Each object is then classified into one or more categories, e.g. ‘film’, ‘car’, ‘medicine’. For each category there is a range of search intents. [For example] the ‘product’ category will have search intents such as buy something or read customer reviews. So we have a degree of natural language processing, taxonomy, all tied into ‘intent’, which sounds like a very good recipe for highly efficient advertising.
But what if a search query has many potential meanings? Yandex says that Spectrum is able to choose the category and the range of potential user intents for each query to match a user’s expectations as close as possible. It does this by looking at historic search patterns. If the majority of users searching for ‘gone with the wind’ expect to find a film, the majority of search results will be about the film, not the book.
As users’ interests and intents tend to change, the system performs query analysis several times a week’, says Yandex. This amounts to Spectrum analysing about five billion search queries.”
Yandex has been busy. The site recently partnered with VKontakte, Russia’s largest social network, and plans to surface public-facing parts of VKontakte user profiles, in real time, in Yandex searches. If the rumors of a plan to go public are true, will these added features help make Yandex’s IPO a success?
Cynthia Murrell, March 15, 2017
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