Against bloggers

On the Change.org website there is a collection of signatures under the petition posted by the Russian user, "Return the search by blogs archives." The company "Yandex" purposefully limited the issuance of the results "Search by blogs". First of all, this applies to the Russian -speaking community of the Living Journal (www.livejournal.com), which has existed since 2001.

Recently, materials over two months with the help of this service cannot be found. This decision makes a significant array of information inaccessible to users, the signatures of the appeal say. But the “living magazine” always won in comparison, say, with Facebook precisely the fact that the records in it were easily accessible for an arbitrarily accessible for a long time. ”

The blogosphere has been subjected to the first year and has been subjected to “Yandex” restrictions. A few years ago, the ratings and the top blog of the news were removed. In the early summer of this year, a link to "Floor Search" disappeared from all the pages of Yandex. Users still found this service, referring directly to www.blogs.yandex.ru. Subsequently, the link was nevertheless returned to the number of other services.

However, as it turned out, not archives.

For a long period, "Search for Blogs" Yandex "remained the most convenient and effective tool for finding information in the Russian -speaking blogosphere. To illustrate, I will give a small example.

In our age of information technology, if you are not mentioned in the media space, then you, in fact, do not exist

For more than nine years, I have been writing about the unlawful criminal prosecution of the former employee of the Yukos company Alexei Pichugin. In my blog, the “Live Journal” has a chronicle of its trial, starting in April 2006. Until recently, any of these records could be easily found using the Yandex Blog Search. Now, the instrument on request: "Alexey Pichugin" gives out only two pages of results, although in reality the materials over the past years have been published many times more. But the fact that there are more old (and possibly no less necessary) entries, Yandex does not even notify.

Yandex motivates the restrictions on the fact that "the vast majority of users are looking for fresh, they rarely turn to archives." This statement seems doubtful to me. In my opinion, it is precisely the "old" information due to the imperfection of human memory that more often needs to be fulfilled and clarified. And the value of the blogosphere, as the authors of the application for Change.org rightly note, is not only fresh information and reaction to news, but also in archival records. In our age of information technology, if you are not mentioned in the media space, then you, in fact, do not exist.

“We are deeply convinced that the search for information and access to it is basic and inalienable human rights, this is also enshrined in Article 29 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation,” the Yandex press released, issued in the middle of this summer in connection with the so-called law “On the right to oblivion”, which was adopted by the State Duma of the Russian Federation. But this law, reasonably, in my opinion, criticized by Yandex, allows Russian citizens to seek from search systems to remove links to inaccurate and irrelevant information about themselves a long time ago. Meanwhile, the "Search for Blogs" archive in two months is incomparably smaller than the framework established by the Law "On oblivion".

Yandex is justified by the fact that in the "large search" all notes are still indexed without restriction on the time of their placement. But he, it seems to me, is much less convenient for bloggers. My experience shows: you will not often find what is needed, especially if an accurate phrase is not set in the request. In addition, a significant part of the results of the "big search" is the repetitions of the same.

Another way out of the situation can be considered an expanded search through the Google system . For example, the search using this tool according to the same keywords of Alexei Pichugin on the website www.sivilia-1.livejournal.com , unlike the current “Yandex” search for blogs, gives out more than ten pages of results.

However, alas, Google , unlike Yandex, does not index comments - if the keywords are in a commentary on the record, then as a result, it will probably not be issued.

I am not a lover of conspiracy theories. But I can’t help but note that the famous motto: "Yandex - there will be everything!" Now it corresponds to reality only with a stretch. It seems that the restriction of the search depth of only fresh records can become an elegant means to combat freedom of speech in the Russian -speaking blogosphere.

Vera Vasilieva is an independent journalist, the author of the books “How Alexei Pichugin was judged”, “The third court of Alexei Pichugin: Chronicles of the Yukos case”, “Without witnesses? It’s non -Zemnolin: Notes of an eyewitness of the correspondence process”, “Alexei Pichugin - paths and overwhelming”