On Wednesday, Yandex, a major search engine provider in its home country of Russia, announced the beta phase of a global version of its search engine, adding another player to the search engine optimization (SEO) industry.
According to the company, Yandex has been preparing for the move for the past two years by indexing foreign websites and global content. Yandex.ru already allows users to view foreign language content, but global results are pushed to the bottom of the search queries.
Yandex.com features new search algorithms specifically designed to enhance foreign searches. The site will also feature multimedia search results, like images and videos, in the future. For those concerned with search engine optimization (SEO), the algorithm is based on Yandex’s proprietary MatrixNet technology.
Currently, Yandex indexes more than four billion pages that use Latin-based alphabets, with the majority being in English.
Yandex has impressed a few search critics with its simplicity and the quality of its results. Search expert Duncan Morris said on his company’s blog that he was so impressed that if he were Google he would "start paying attention to what was going on" with Yandex.
