What is Yandex?
Yandex (yandex.com) is a free search engine website that has its own index for searching the web, including images and videos, that is based on Russia1.
Main Features
Although lesser known outside of Russia, Yandex is a major tech company in Russia, able to provide many services that Google and Bing provide globally. In fact, they're arguably better as a web search engine than the more well-known DuckDuckGo, considering DuckDuckGo (like many other alternative search engines) have a partnership with Bing to show results from Bing's index when you search in them, while Yandex has its own index, so the results are really coming from Yandex, and not from Bing.
That said, Yandex does have one problem: although they provide an English website, they're still mainly a Russian search engine, so results on Yandex are biased toward webpages written in the Russian language. This language barrier likely also affects its ability to properly censor its results—for example, it may allow spam websites in English to make it into results because their anti-spam technology and staff would be more focused on spam in Russian instead.
Some of the services Yandex provides include:
Web search: searching the web for webpages and websites. Advanced search interface seems to be limited to refining when a webpage was published, in which language, and where it's from. Yandex has search operators2, they are:
!dog- matches only "dog" in singular, not "dogs" in plural.+from- ensures that the word doesn't get ignored, as is usually the case with words like "from," "if," "for," "and," etc."cereal and milk"- surround a phrase with quotes to ensure the entire phrase appears in order."cereal * milk"- use an asterisk as wildcard, so Yandex can put any word between "cereal" and "milk." This semes to work a bit different from Google's asterisk operator. In Google, the asterisk always matches at least one word, so "cereal milk" wouldn't be matched. In Yandex, "cereal milk" is matched, so zero words also count.cat | dog- this should be the "or" operator that searches for one thing or another. For some reason for me it only shows results for the first thing. I guess it only works if you run out of results?-term- excludes term from search.
Image search: searching for images on the internet. Advanced filters include: searching for images by their exact dimensions (e.g. 1600x900, to search for a wallpapers); filtering by landscape, portrait and square orientation; filtering by main color; filtering by file format: JPG, PNG, or GIF; and searching for images from a specific website.
Reverse image search: labelled "visual search," allows you to find webpages that contain a given image by uploading that image to Yandex. This can be accessed by clicking on a camera icon next to the search box, by directly dragging an image into the webpage, or by pressing Ctrl+V to paste an image you previously copied into your clipboard while the search box has keyboard focus (these last two appear to work only when you are on the "images" search pages and won't work from the homepage). It appears to use some sort of image vision-related artificial intelligence, since it can tell you what the image contains. It lists all webpages that have it, and similar images, including images that are flipped or contain the image yo uploaded. It also shows a list of sizes for that image that if you click go directly to a version in that resolution. Beware, however, that when I tried it, the highest resolution had my browser warning me that the URL was potentially dangerous! Most likely some malicious hacker out there is taking images from the Internet, scaling them up so they become bigger than the original images, and then putting those images in websites infested with malware. By doing this, they appear to have the highest definition version of an image and so are given priority by search engines and more people click on them.
Video search: searching for videos on Youtube and other video websites.
Other services include maps, a translation service, weather news, an e-mail provider service, and... free web browser games...? Wait, what? Let me check this for a moment.
I really like this New Bubble Shooter3 game. It's a nice mini-game and it actually has a "You Win!" screen if you manage to clear all the bubbles. I thought it wouldn't let me win at first because it's very difficult to clear a line at the end, but if you clear all bubbles of one color they stop appearing, making it easier to finish the game. It seems this service is mainly simple browser games designed to show ads every now and then. You can play them without creating an account or downloading an executable, which is nice, and you can pay to remove ads temporarily, at a rate of 3 days per 1 dollar.
For webmasters, they provide access to search statistics (which of your website's webpages showed on search, for which queries, how many times, and how often were they clicked). This would be the equivalent of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
References
- https://yandex.com/company/general_info/yandex_today/ (accessed 2024-04-18).
"In our home market, Russia, our share of all search traffic is 61.0%." ↩︎ - https://yandex.com/support/search/query-language/search-context.html (accessed 2024-04-18) ↩︎
- https://yandex.com/games/app/277241 (accessed 2024-04-18). ↩︎
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