Yandex and Web Surfing in a Multilingual World
Searching in Russian and English Languages
Apr 17, 2009
Although most web surfers are familiar with Google as the usual search engine they identify with when browsing for information, Russia’s largest internet company, Yandex, whose websites attract a workday audience of more than 11 million users (as of the start of 2009) from Russia, Ukraine and other countries, reminds us that the web is a multilingual parallel world of its own which much of the English language speaking users are unaware of.
Emergence of the Web and Yandex
Yandex is quite an interesting search engine because it precedes Google. In fact, Yandex was founded in the late 1980s, right at the beginning of the emergence of the Web. Yandex is a classic case study that Google is not the end all and be all of search. Google may be good in English, but tends to fare less well in multilingual searching.
English, it turns out, is only a fraction of the Internet's languages.
Non-English Algorithms
What is interesting is that Yandex's search algorithm is rooted in the highly inflected and very peculiar Russian language. Words can take on some twenty different endings to indicate their relationship to one another.
Like the many other non-English languages, this inflection makes the language of Russian precise, but makes search extremely difficult. Google fetches the exact word combination you enter into the search bar, leaving out the slightly different forms that mean similar things. However, Yandex is unique in that it does catch the inflection. Fortune has written an interesting article on Yandex, and my favourite part is its examination into the unique features of this Russian search giant.
Russian Applications for a Russian Audience
While some of its services are similar to offerings available in the U.S. (blog rankings, online banking), it also has developed some applications that only Russians can enjoy, such as an image search engine that eliminates repeated images, a portrait filter that ferrets out faces in an image search, and a real-time traffic report that taps into users' roving cellphone signals to monitor how quickly people are moving through crowded roads in more than a dozen Russian cities.
A Global Diversity
As Yandex reveals, the Web is a diverse and organic space which is constantly evolving. Search engines are an important piece to this puzzle, a small but significant piece that reflects the multicultural and ethnically diverse world.
Therefore, the web society must be careful not to limit itself in an Anglo frame of mind when conducting important searches. Searchers must remember that information comes in different languages and from a rich multitude of sources.
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