They are curtailing the search.

"Yandex" closes its rating of blogs. Others will take his place

Created in 2004, "Top Yandex" by blog entries, as runeters call it, quickly became a popular service. And now it won't. Writer and well-known blogger Maxim Sviridenkov, in an open letter to Yandex, described ...

Created in 2004, "Top Yandex" by blog entries, as runeters call it, quickly became a popular service. And now it won't. The writer and well-known blogger Maxim Sviridenkov, in an open letter to Yandex, described the situation as catastrophic: “You made all of us, ordinary citizens of the Russian Federation, the CIS and other Russian-speaking users who keep online diaries, feel that we are NOBODY and call us NO!”

Yandex itself, represented by the manager of this project, Anton Volnukhin, explains its decision as caused by the actual transformation of the technical service into a media tool, or, in Russian, a propaganda tool. “Many bloggers began to write, comment and link just to “bring the post to the top”. Robot bloggers also appeared, which littered the blogosphere with the same goal - to get into the rating of popular entries, ”writes Volnukhin.

The well-known Internet figure Anton Nosik expressed the general opinion of the most conspiratorial part of the LJ audience in the following way: but he could hint at it quite transparently.” According to this version, Yandex did not want to follow the lead of the authorities, but preferred to simply close the shop. However, the reason is undoubtedly somewhat more complicated than the mere desire of someone from above to silence the “voice of the people”.

Any information retrieval system, no matter what super technologies it is based on, has one fundamental drawback: such a system is always a rating at the same time, even if it does not explicitly pursue such a goal. Try not only to come up with an acceptable algorithm for automatic rating, but at least manually place sites in order of some “significance” for such queries as “dentistry” or “plastic windows”. Nothing will come of it simply because there is no objective criterion for evaluating dental clinics or window installation companies based on the content of their sites alone: ​​they all offer basically the same thing, and even for about the same money.

Hence the emergence of a whole line of business - the provision of services for "search engine optimization", i.e. promotion of sites to the first places in the list of search engine results. Indeed, according to statistics, half of the users do not advance beyond the first page of search results, and beyond the second - in general, a few percent. Therefore, for many commercial sites, getting into the top ten or at least twenty is vital. This is a rather complex art that requires experience and a thorough knowledge of technology, and quite legal and respected "optimizers" in this field are forced to compete with illegal "cheaters". “Illegality” here should be understood not in terms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, of course, but simply as a set of condemned tricks that search engines have to constantly fight with - otherwise you would receive one advertisement in the first lines for any request.

But if for ordinary sites in some cases it is still possible to come up with some “objective” criteria - at least the notorious attendance or the so-called citation index, which shows how often others link to this site, then in the blogosphere it is difficult to do. In this blurry environment, tens of thousands of messages appear every day, each of which by itself is read by only tens or hundreds, at most thousands of people. So it turns out expanse for "optimizers" of various kinds - from amateur political technologists to quite serious uncles from the competent authorities. An article on the Private Correspondent website called the search for Yandex on blogs "a tool of every self-respecting PR specialist, regardless of the industry, a journalist, and even numerous intelligence officers."

So whatever the real reason, in fact, "Yandex" admitted that he had not coped with the situation that got out of control. But those who speak about the loss of the tool by bloggers are also right, which, according to Maxim Sviridenkov, "for many years was a source not just of Freedom of Speech, but of Freedom to Be Heard." Anticipating such a reaction, Yandex released software for organizing such services, which must be understood as "we did not manage it, so try it yourself now."

And the result was not long in coming - almost immediately Artemy Lebedev, a well-known website designer (and, by the way, a top blogger in LiveJournal), as well as the WhoYOUgle directory site, the creator and co-owner of which is Anton Nosik, announced the opening of their blog search services. What will come of it - we'll see. Ideally, as many note, it would be nice if the second search engine in Runet, which became the Russian version of Google, took over this business - at least hardly anyone would suspect a world-famous company of exposure to “telephone law” ...