Yandex Search Engine has beed launched | Hacker News Reader

Yandex Search Engine has beed launched

yandex.com

68 pointsholoomix34 comments

Yandex has been #1 in Russian speaking segment of the internet for the last 10 years or so. I use it almost every day. It looks like this expansion into English speaking market is just an experiment, and I'm not sure what they are trying to achieve. It doesn't look like they can compete with Google or Bing.

edit: btw, one of the interesting features Yandex provides and Google still doesn't is street view for Russian cities: http://maps.yandex.ru/-/CFfz7mA.

i've used it to search for russian stuff before, not really a fan of the interface....looks too much like yahoo circa 15 years ago

try ya.ru

I like the favicons being included. Makes it really easy to identify familiar sites.

Overall it feels like a really nice design, but I can't pinpoint why exactly. Might be because Google's strayed so far from the original and simple interface.

Inspired by Yandex, I've made Faviconize Google user script, which adds favicons to the Google's search result page.

User script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/58177

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/fijobgpmmkilncag...

Yandex appears to load the favicons from their own cache. If your extension hits the sites themselves, you're leaking the fact that they are appearing in a person's search results to the target sites... and maybe even the query terms, via the referrer header. You should probably mention that fact to users who might not deduce it themselves.

My script takes the favicons from Google. http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=news.ycombinator.co...

Interesting - my first search (for hyperion) brought back more interesting results than Google. Not a very scientific study, but that's the first time that has happened to me since I first used Google and searched for java and actually found something about the programming language.

The favicons are a good idea - they do make scanning the list of results a lot easier, even if the overall layout of the page is a bit weird.

Seems slow. What's with the multiple redirects? Results seem ok though.

But no privacy policy that I could locate so far, which is a bad sign

http://company.yandex.ru/legal/confidential/ but you have to translate it :)

Looks good.

The favicons increase page load times without adding a whole lot. I'd delay their loads via Javascript, if possible.

Edit: Getting a fairly consistent crash in Safari after trying to enable resource tracking in web inspector:

  0   com.apple.WebCore             	0x00007fff84c975fb WebCore::SecurityOrigin::canAccess(WebCore::SecurityOrigin const*) const + 27
  1   com.apple.WebCore             	0x00007fff84ce166e WebCore::allowsAccessFromFrame(JSC::ExecState*, WebCore::Frame*) + 174
  2   com.apple.WebCore             	0x00007fff84d771cb WebCore::checkNodeSecurity(JSC::ExecState*, WebCore::Node*) + 27
  3   com.apple.WebCore             	0x00007fff84d84302 WebCore::jsDOMWindowFrameElement(JSC::ExecState*, JSC::Identifier const&, JSC::PropertySlot const&) + 306
  4   com.apple.WebCore             	0x00007fff850528cd WebCore::JSQuarantinedObjectWrapper::getOwnPropertySlot(JSC::ExecState*, JSC::Identifier const&, JSC::PropertySlot&) + 253
  5   com.apple.JavaScriptCore      	0x00007fff808ffb26 JSC::JSValue::get(JSC::ExecState*, JSC::Identifier const&, JSC::PropertySlot&) const + 486

Their spam filtering service looks interesting: http://so.yandex.ru/all/index.xml

I'll stick with google for now, at least it finds pg's wire transfer pdf when I look for RM9637.00

I wonder how many Googlebot hits per hour HN gets... everything seems to be indexed almost instantly.

http://imgur.com/kAPls.png

The homepage is indexed about 12 times per day as far as I can measure it. I've never managed to get an age > 2 hours for the links posted there.

I made an Opensearch plugin for it. Suggestions are not working but it is usable: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=yandex.co...

Page Design by Art Lebedev, of Maximus keyboard fame:

http://www.artlebedev.com/

Good job, Russians

wtf, no good job? =)

I really like their Ctrl + → keybinding for next page (although, much like on DuckDuckGo) I find the favicons distracting).

Hmm, started with a vanity search and got totally irrelevant results. Then tried vanity searches with friends names. Again, bad results. Putting the names in quotes seems to do a better job, so the problem doesn't seem to be coverage. Makes it seem like they may not be doing a very good pagerank-like calculation.

Yandex Technologies: http://company.yandex.com/general_info/technologies.xml

Most traffic is from China http://www.websitetrafficspy.com/www.yandex.com

I will try it for a few days and see if I can substitute Google. I always try new search engines but none seem to be as good as Google.

Not bad, now they need the whole ecosystem starting with image search then email, then calendar, then...

http://images.yandex.ru/, http://mail.yandex.ru/, http://calendar.yandex.ru/, etc.

And even a browser:

http://chrome.yandex.ru/

Three browsers: http://fx.yandex.ru, http://ie.yandex.ru :-)

Unfortunately I get redirected to the mobile version of the Russian site...

I've noticed your crawler frequently on my site. Is it following from HN?

P.s. Good luck!

Would have preferred more info on the search page rather than having to click "About"