14 DAY TRIAL // Yandex may be largely unknown outside its Russian-speaking market, but the search engine is looking to make a name for itself more broadly.
It has already moved into some interesting markets, Turkey in particular, but it's also looking to get a broader global presence.
It's now introducing some interesting feature to the results. The company says it wants to go beyond answers and provide people with solutions.
That is, instead of just giving users a useful link or even providing direct answers to some questions, it wants to make it possible for them to get something done straight from the search results. Incidentally, this new feature is available in Turkey first.
"We have been thinking about offering web users a shortcut precisely to what they need, and we came up with a new concept of a goal-oriented search platform," Yandex explained.
"Yandex's new search platform embodies our new approach to search and website engagement, and features an attention-based search results page, where each search result is a standalone block of interactive information – an Island," it added.
For example, when looking for airline tickets, you can now not only get a link to the airline's site or just flight departure info, you can even book a flight straight from the search results.
Obviously, this relies on websites using the new tools offered by Yandex and integrating this functionality into the search engine.
But Yandex can create "islands" for websites automatically using the standard snippets algorithm. Not all of these will be entirely useful, but this is why Yandex is offering webmasters the chance to customize the feature.
It's still a very interesting concept and, crucially, one that is unique to Yandex. Google does offer integration with its own services and offers expanded info for some websites, via metadata, but there's no interactivity straight from the search results page.