
Yandex Islands - thewarrior
http://beta.yandex.com/
======
recuter
A few thoughts on the game theory involved here:

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.

~~~
msy
I wonder how long before/whether a major player will simply decides google et
al freeloading off their hard-produced data and displaying it in search
results makes being listed a net loss and goes for a social-only model of
traffic sourcing with a block-all robots.txt Between Google pulling out prices
and reviews & Google News auto-generating summaries and snippets of on-the-
ground reporters it feels like a matter of time. Maybe a halfway house would
be starting to de-index hot news/exclusives for the first few hours.

~~~
bergie
For content sites this is indeed a problem, but for somebody actually _selling
or providing a service_ over the web this isn't too bad.

After all it doesn't matter if the purchases come from your website or from
Yandex Islands, as long as they come.

~~~
balabaster
I think many people forget that companies don't have a website for the sake of
having a website. They have a website for the sake of increasing
sales/revenues and profits. As long as it meets that business objective,
companies usually don't care how that's achieved.

~~~
qznc
If Google provides the UI, you don't have to pay any graphics designer anymore
for your service website. :)

------
frozenport
I really liked the approach of Kartoo:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoo) .
Unfortunately, due its infrastructure and flash front end it was not
sufficiently fast to beat Goolge: but it often could narrow ambiguous queries
faster. For example it was better when searching for compiler errors as you
could visually select the applicable context.

------
fhd2
I think the idea that websites can change their search result, make it
interactive even, is quite good.

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.

~~~
diminish
what if instead of linking to functions (islands) via forms, they end up
implementing those functions, themselves? search engines will end up being
more app platforms..

~~~
fhd2
I thought that's exactly what Yandes Islands are about. Are they just forms?
That'd be boring.

------
winter_blue
Found Easter Egg! If you click on the image at the very end of the image (the
one with Christopher Columbus), it'll flip over to reveal what seems to be
signatures of devs working on Yandex (or probably just Islands).

~~~
robert-boehnke
This may be a reference to the Macintosh 128K, which had its casing's inside
signed by the developers
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K)

------
ForFreedom
1\. How did this hit the top posts? 2\. The website is very marketing and
confusing. 3\. What is Yandex, that is what I want to know the first few
seconds when I view their website. It looks as if I am buying a no-man island
somewhere.

~~~
vngg
how can you not be aware of Yandex?

~~~
Grue3
Why would anyone _be_ aware of Yandex unless they live in Russia? Even here, I
mostly use Google.

~~~
Jgrubb
I'm personally aware of Yandex because they have one of the most aggressive
search crawlers on the entire internet, judging from our Apache logs.

------
yeonhoyoon
Korea's biggest search engine(www.naver.com) is basically like this. they
created a walled garden that gives you practically everything. These portal
type sites disincentivize individual sites from creating contents, because the
search engine directs the traffic into their own services(Q&A, blog, etc.).

------
menato
It looks like Yandex intentions is similar to what JavaScript did to browsers.

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.

~~~
winter_blue
Most search engines (and Yandex too I assume), crawl the _static_ web. So if
you have a web page whose content is auto-generated using Javscript, it likely
won't be indexed by many search engines. Google has been working on this for a
while, but it's definitely a very hard problem (tm) to solve (and
computationally expensive too).

~~~
menato
It's not exactly about parsing JS output: JS output is something which is
dedicated for user of webpage.

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.

------
MichaelApproved
I'm having trouble understanding how this is different than Google
Search/Images/Maps/Places/News/Etc.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Basically you can, as an owner of a website, define a "wizard" that will be
shown on the search engine results page which users can interact with - not
just a dumb link to your website.

And the visual nicety too.

------
k_bx
It seems very much like a "widgets" idea, which for me, really sucks. You
can't book a flight at search result inside a tiny window, it's stupid.

It's great for something like Wolphram Alpha for math answers, currency
conversion, weather etc, but not more. Widgets.

~~~
vidarh
You are jumping to conclusions about limitations of the service. As far as I
can see there's no requirement that the process is completed "inside a tiny
window". For the flight, you could have it show date selectors and select
where to fly to and from, and bring the user straight to a list of flights on
the normal website, for example, rather than make them complete the whole
thing in a little box.

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?

~~~
k_bx
> As far as I can see there's no requirement that the process is completed
> "inside a tiny window"

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!

------
sologoub
This doesn't seem all that different from what Google is doing with Google
Now, except Yandex doesn't actually know when my flight is, so it can't serve
up the card UI (or island UI) proactively, but has to rely on a search term.

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.

------
nicksergeant
Looks interesting, so I tried the search at
[http://yandex.com](http://yandex.com). I tried a few searches. Eventually I
got:

[http://i.imgur.com/Q7C0rRd.png](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](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).

~~~
rorrr2
Google does that too for unusual (yet correct) requests. Try googling this:

    
    
        he is "100000000..900000000" years old

~~~
dragonwriter
It looks like that happens because the system that expands ranges into
multiple queries is in front of the system that detects and blocks rapid
clustered queries, so the query you entered looks is an _enormous_ flood of
queries in a very short time by the time it reeaches the abuse detection
system.

Given 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.

------
humanfromearth
Seems like it's similar to Google's Knowledge Graph. Very nice. Well done
Yandex.

~~~
mhd
The Columbus example looks that way, but I think the big new item is that
you're able to add your own forms to search results (as a site, not as a
user).

[http://interactive-answers.webmaster.yandex.com](http://interactive-
answers.webmaster.yandex.com)

------
a-nikolaev
This feature looks a lot like DuckDuckGo Instant Answer. I think, there is no
reason to be very paranoid about it. Googly sandbox is a completely different
thing. Yandex does not really lock you to their apps and services, and
(hopefully) does not collect your private info, they only give you a quick way
to interact with other web sites.

------
x3c
Not rendering correctly for Firefox 21.0 (Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu Canonical
1.0). Am I the only one facing this issue?

------
shaunyi
I think this so called island is just like what Baidu just have done. Baidu's
Aladdin project has provided a lot of service in the search result,such as
flight,train when you input two places. I don't think this Islands could do
something different.I didn't see anything new in their video,neither.

------
moontear
And only available in certain countries. Why? I'd like to give it a shot
without hunting down a Turkish proxy.

~~~
guard-of-terra
I guess it's either live on [http://yandex.com](http://yandex.com) or will be
soon.

------
purephase
That was one hell of a dramatic video. When the visual interface guy walks in
I thought he'd be packing.

------
NKCSS
This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen come out of a search engine.
The potential is awesome.

------
acoleman616
For those of you who also missed it on the first pass, the "Islander" circle
(under the "Islands" header) is clickable.

------
znowi
Yandex is traditionally playing catch up with Google copying their ideas. This
time - it is Knowledge Graph.

~~~
rusy
It's not Knowledge Graph, from a comment below: "The Columbus example looks
that way, but I think the big new item is that you're able to add your own
forms to search results (as a site, not as a user). [http://interactive-
answers.webmaster.yandex.com&quot](http://interactive-
answers.webmaster.yandex.com&quot);

~~~
rusy
Sorry here is the right link: [http://interactive-
answers.webmaster.yandex.com](http://interactive-answers.webmaster.yandex.com)

------
coherentpony
I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish.

------
dmead
15 seconds on the page and i have no idea what it's for

------
TazeTSchnitzel
That video was rather pretentious.

------
taktix
I think a lot of people (myself included) are craving something different in
the search space. From Altavista right up until now, search hasn't really
changed much over the years. Refined and improved for sure, but not changed.

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._

~~~
DanBC
> It's like we're all stuck in the same paradigm - the same way of thinking.

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.

~~~
sanxiyn
You may enjoy [http://millionshort.com](http://millionshort.com) then.

------
miguelrochefort
I want in island. Literally.

------
sjtgraham
I expected this thread to have been hijacked by complaints of a video of
exclusively white men and "No man is an island" in massive letters.

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.

~~~
hazov
The majority of stimulation we receive is just waste of time by your
philosophy.

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.

~~~
sjtgraham
I'm not a bad Spanish speaker, also have been trying to learn Mandarin. Native
English speakers are used to hearing things aloud, because everything we
consume is in English. If English is not your native tongue it's
understandable that you would be more used to reading subtitles, having
perhaps grown up watching subtitled Hollywood films for example.

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.

~~~
hazov
Maybe ignorance yes, the fact is I do not share their experience, I only
watched dubbed stuff in either Hebrew or Portuguese until my early teens
although I learned Yiddish first. It was from mainly 2000 to 2002 that I
learned to read subtitles and after that I never needed it anymore unless in a
language that I don't know.

Good to know you're not in that second group.

I not a fan of Satriani but keep rocking.

