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.
Youe nimble search engine will have nowhere to send users.
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.
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.
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.
In Germany the publishers realized that it's a net loss but instead of doing what you described they lobbied a law [1] ("Google tax") that will prevent search engines from showing snippets and thumbnails. The law has passed and will apply from August 1, 2013 onwards.
I really liked the approach of 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.
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.
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..
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).
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.
You're not viewing their “website”, you're viewing a page dedicated to their new technology that they will incorporate into their search. If don't know what Yandex is, why don't you just visit yandex.com?
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.).
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.
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).
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.
I see this as "apps for search engine results". They appear on Yandex when searching for certain things, but not created by them. Instead supplied by developers.
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.
I'm having trouble understanding the home page - the language is a little too marketing speak for me. What exactly does this do that my other search engine X doesn't (concisely)?
Concisely? If you are familiar with DuckDuckGo's Spice goodies (https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/blob/master/documen...), this is basically the same except you don't have to submit code to DDG to call your API, you use semantic HTML & upload an XML layout file.
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?
> 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!
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.
- 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).
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.
Google also does this if you proxy your requests through a cloud IP space. I proxy my Google searches through rackspace IPs and I was given a CAPTCHA on nearly every search.
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".
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).
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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sorry for you for all the extraordinary films and media you have missed. Mandarin is spoken natively by twice as many people as English, then Hindustani, Spanish and Russian. Notwithstanding the best of Japanese, French, Italian, German and Swedish cinema.
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.
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.