Yandex Islands
beta.yandex.com
beta.yandex.com
So in the past Google distinguished itself by optimizing for their users to spend as little time as possible on their website -- as opposed to all the big portals of the time trying to keep you within their sandbox.
This trait made them a lasting household name out of the many competitors of the time. Now they are increasingly trying to go the other way and keep you in their goggly sandbox as much as possible. Yandex is taking this new approach even farther. Up and coming websites are compelled to create such wizards and whatever microformats the leading sources of search engine traffic ask of them - this is rewarded by totally standing out in the search results and doing an endrun around established players who would normally get clicked through to.
However.. its easy to extrapolate what will happen. The most useful and profitable of these integrations over time will emerge, as the search engines have all of the data to make that analysis. Then they get simply swapped out for their googly/yandaxy/bing offering.. the users are none the wiser, they have been accustomed to this interface and don't really care if its some website or google providing the wizard. The portal approach wins, the web returns to the dark ages. A new nimble search engine emerges optimized towards sending their users on and away from their property as quickly as possible..
/Here endeth this though exercise. I hope I've made my point.
Everything on the web will be either opaque walled gardens (like Facebook) or homogenous services with no obvious "pages" to go to, accessible via external wizards or internal forms or apis.
Of course there is always wikipedia, but for general purpose searches the surface of interesting web pages shrinks.
Suppose sites like Hipmunk succumb to the siren song and do the microformat dance like Google wants in order to show up as a fancy card/wizard in the results -- and eventually Google swaps them out for identical ITA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software) / Knowledge Graph / 'etc sourced ones, thus killing Hipmunk.
1) Antitrust lawsuits will surely happen. Perhaps at that point Google is so big and adept at playing this game so..
2) Inevitable overhead from being a large bureaucratic corporation leaves enough margin for the Hipmunks of the world to exist outside this ecosystem and still be used by prosumers. Which leads to a comeback of the old-timey Google styled search engines whose value proposition is to float such sources fairly in its results. With the margin being big enough they will gain popularity for the same reasons Google itself initially did.
Edit: Walled Gardens can hold, but only for awhile as 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy' always applies.
After all it doesn't matter if the purchases come from your website or from Yandex Islands, as long as they come.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_p...
But I'm not really able to come up with many examples where this actually improves the user experience. Searching for something like VLC and being presented with a download button (and maybe a language/platform selection) right away, that's neat.
But booking a flight in a search result? Seems too important/expensive for such little screen real estate.
Initially browsers could just ask for a static content. Later some interactivity was added and sites changed from beeing a [content] entity to a [content, on-action] entity.
Here we also have: initially sites were static for search engine, but now there is an interactivity support, which should split monolith entity of site.
Ilands interface of site is something dedicated to search engine from the origin and helps to create a new layer between search engine and site.
And the visual nicety too.
At this point they seem limited to just forms, but maybe in the future it could be possible to make richer apps. The search engine could be a platform like Facebook or iOS.
It's great for something like Wolphram Alpha for math answers, currency conversion, weather etc, but not more. Widgets.
So yes, widgets, though you seem to underestimate the utility of widgets. There are plenty of travel agencies with widgets for the first booking/search step on third party sites.
How would that suck compared to just getting a text snippet and have to click through to a separate web site to even start the search process?
Sure. I was referring to initial input form only. It's limited. Both, in space it can use (I hope Yandex won't let those widgets be huge), and in interactivity, like drawing complex HTML right away, without pressing "submit" (both, Yandex and Google would agree that it's a nice feature :) ((I saw that there are a lot of features, like interactivity are possible, but it's still not good old HTML+JS))
> So yes, widgets, though you seem to underestimate the utility of widgets. There are plenty of travel agencies with widgets for the first booking/search step on third party sites.
Well, you're absolutely right in this statement. For some reason, I'd be rather annoyed by these forms, and wouldn't trust them (same reasons: limited functionality and UI space).
Of course, let's all see how Yandex proves I'm wrong and they came up with great know-how!
The appointment booking thing got me a bit puzzled though - this requires pretty deep integration with whatever practice management software the doctor is using. The only workaround I can think of, is that they are relying on their Yandex Calendar service to power it. If so, not the best experience for vendors, and potentially a problem for consumers, as the two systems can be grossly out of sync.
Service booking in general is not as simply as it sounds - as a consumer, you have no idea if your appointment should be for 10 mins, 2 hours, something in between. Typically, a sort of inference is required on the part of the system to figure it out, usually, by asking person booking the appointment some questions. Such mappings are very tedious and industry/locale specific.
http://i.imgur.com/Q7C0rRd.png
This is not a good user experience. You immediately assume I'm doing something bad / wrong because I did about 4 searches within 20 seconds?
So I read http://i.imgur.com/NITisTs.png
- There are no other users on my network. - I made 4 search requests inside of 20 seconds. - I have no plugins that are performing search requests on my behalf. - I'm fairly certain my computer is not infected with a virus (I'm on OS X, and even have ClamXav running).
he is "100000000..900000000" years oldGiven the effect it would seem to have on load to execute queries of that magnitude, its not entirely unreasonable behavior although it would be better UX if the error returned distinguished the problem more clearly.
I actually stopped using Google because of this (and privacy/creepiness issues). I switched to Bing. I have to say, Bing has gotten really good. When others saw me using it, they started using it too. Most of my office has switched now and people have stopped saying "google it" and started saying "bing it".
It's like we're all stuck in the same paradigm - the same way of thinking.
I'm excited about Yandex and it looks promising, but the landing page needs a copywriter badly.
Edit: That's an open invitation
I would like a search engine that brings back some of the serendipity to searching. A search engine that doesn't help you find a specific piece of information, but that helps you explore the domain by getting you to places where information is shared.
I remember when you could search for something, and the hits would be relevant and free of SEO. There'd be some results from .edu tlds, and some autodidact would have a nice page crammed full of information, and useful links.
Anyway, this looks pretty interesting but the main takeaway from this for me is how disadvantaged non-English media are, i.e. I found it very difficult to pay attention to the subtitles for very long, eventually losing interest completely. At least when they're in English I can tab over and passively listen while I get on with whatever I'm doing. I'm sure Yandex doesn't care as presumably all of their customers are Russian, but it raises the issue that these kinds of videos are indulgent at the best of times, and the information conveyed per time is very poor, the main reason I find conference talks hard going too.
You're right about one thing though, my American (and British, Australians, Anglo Canadians among others from the same language group) friends are lazy as hell to read subtitles generally, the majority never ever getting interest of learning another language since almost anyone learns some English, which really puzzles me.
The brain optimises itself to tasks it performs most often, so understand that reading subtitles for an extended period of time would be more mental effort to someone not used to doing that than it is for you. I think you're ignorant for equating that with laziness.
> The majority of stimulation we receive is just waste of time by your philosophy.
Yep. I'm wasting my time jamming along to a Joe Satriani CD on my guitar right now. Totally wasting my life.
Good to know you're not in that second group.
I not a fan of Satriani but keep rocking.
Well, you are not alone in this as an English speaker. Trying to see a popular yet non-dubbed film or television program in France, Spain or Germany is an exercise in itself.