The Yandex company has begun testing a new social service, Aura, which operates within its mobile application. This was initially reported by Roem.ru, citing unnamed employees of the search engine. Later, a Yandex representative confirmed to Vedomosti that the company had launched beta testing of the service.

According to a company representative, Aura , based on machine learning, neural networks and other Yandex technologies, will help the user find people with similar interests and environments. “ The user can join communities, create posts and target them not to a limited circle of subscribers, but to a selected audience,” said a Yandex representative.

The service's promo page states that the service's feed will be generated automatically based on the search engine's data on the user's interests and geolocation. The user will be able to choose who will see their posts by specifying the age, gender, or location of the audience, and also influence the content of the feed by marking the publications they like and "swiping right" those they don't. For now, you can get into Aura by invitation from a member. The company did not specify when the service will become public.

Yandex had previously tried to launch its own social service. Its blog service Ya.ru appeared in 2007. In 2009, it became one of the four largest blog hosting services in Runet, along with Livejournal.com, Blogs.Mail.ru, and Liveinternet. After that, the service's popularity began to decline - this happened along with the decline in the popularity of the blogosphere as a whole and the growth of social networks, the company explained. In 2014, Yandex closed the project, explaining its decision by the lack of interest from users in it. The company also linked the closure of Ya.ru to legislative initiatives concerning bloggers. In 2014, a law came into effect in Russia that effectively equated popular bloggers - those whose audience exceeds 3,000 users per day - with the media.

Yandex has begun testing a new social service