OREANDA-NEWS. December 2, 2009. Yandex launches Yandex.Cities, a service offering local information for users living in cities. Now, urban users can find answers to locally relevant questions like ‘what’s on in the movies’, ‘what’s new’, ‘where to go on a Friday night’ and many more. The first two cities featured on the service are Astana and Almaty, the two major cities in Kazakhstan.

Yandex.Cities is designed to help users quickly get a handle on what’s going on in their city and direct them to the relevant information. So, they can see news headlines or real time flight status right on the city page and then go to a local news website or to Yandex’s travel information service Yandex.Timetable for details.

“What we are aiming at is not to build a city portal,” says Alexander Laryanovsky, head of Regional Development at Yandex. “What we do is show what information is available online and direct our users to websites with the relevant regional content”.

Any widget, an interface element providing visual information, featuring on the Astana or Almaty page is available in the widget catalog and can be easily embedded into Yandex’s front page. Although yandex.kz has been launched only recently, there are already about sixty widgets in Yandex’s widget catalog showing content from local websites. The growing number of locally relevant widgets was one of the reasons why Astana and Almaty were the first cities to have their own pages on Yandex.