Yandex introduced a new version of the search – Y2. The most important thing in the update: video search with voice-over, search for objects and big topics.
The main page and mobile application of Yandex are now focused on search. There is nothing superfluous in them, all attention is directed to the search bar. You can ask a question in any convenient way – text, voice or using a picture. To use the visual search, just point the smart camera at an object or upload an image from the phone’s gallery.
Y2 will help you choose a doctor, an online course, or, say, a product. Now search not only indexes web pages, but also finds information about objects on them, accumulates it and shows it in search results. A person does not need to explore dozens of sites on their own in order to choose a Python course or, for example, find a good therapist. All the most important things can be found right in the search results.
The information will be presented in a structured, easy-to-view form. So, on request [web development courses] Yandex will show a list of training programs with a price, training period and student reviews. It remains only to choose the appropriate course and go to the website of the training center. Now in the Yandex search there are more than 22 thousand educational courses, 730 million products, as well as 740 thousand doctors of various specialties.
With the help of Y2, it is convenient to solve problems that cannot be solved in five minutes. It can be organizing a wedding, buying a house or a car. Yandex has learned to see long-term interest in a particular topic behind individual requests and to structure the information collected by a person so that it can be returned to in one click. A block appears on ya.ru and in the application where it is easy to find the history of your queries on the topic, saved articles and tips, what else to look for.
Now Yandex search highlights such big topics as education, career, finance, family, apartment, renovation, and so on. To recognize interest in a particular topic, Yandex uses a complex classifier based on the YaLM generative neural network.
Y2 has filters to search for videos with automatic voice translation into Russian. For example, to cook real onion soup, you can watch a French video recipe with voice-over. Translation of videos from English, German, French, Italian and Spanish is now available. It works in the Yandex application and in the Browser. Yandex also knows how to translate videos on the fly, even if it’s streaming. Now you can watch live international conferences or, for example, interviews with foreigners. Moreover, it will be a polyphonic machine translation based on the most complex technologies.
Previously introduced child accounts and improved search for programmers are also included in the current update of the search algorithm.
