Yandex has revamped its personalised search, tailoring results around each user’s short-term and long-term interests, providing new channel for brands’ search marketing techniques in the process.
Under the new search algorithm ‘Dublin’, results take into account not only the permanent interests of the user, but also short-term goals.
For example, if a user is frequent client of a popular online retailer and is planning a trip to the Amazon River, they will see search results about the great river in response to their [amazon] search query, and not the link to amazon.com.
The new search can react to short-term interests that arise quickly, but are soon no longer important, such as house repairs or buying a new car.
Yandex said that these type of short term requests account for more than half of its searches.
To take these into account, Yandex analyzes the data of the current user session to determine if it’s a short term or long term interest.