OREANDA-NEWS. July 27, 2010. Yandex launches a new version of its search engine ‘Poltava’ for the Ukrainian web users. The ‘Poltava’ release based on Yandex’s proprietary MatrixNet technology allows to deliver results with local resources ranking higher than other websites for the user’s location-specific queries.

Location-based queries require the search engine to ‘know’ the user’s location to be able to provide good results. When someone in Kharkiv is looking for (English language course), most likely they are interested in studying English at home, but not in Kyiv or Odessa. Depending on the region, location-based queries can total up to 30% of all searches on Yandex. The localized search engine returns local results for each of the 24 Ukrainian regions and for the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

The ‘Poltava’ processes not only a user initial search query but also translates it from Ukrainian into Russian and vice versa. If there are ‘good’ search results found in response to such translation, they are also delivered on the search results page.

“Yandex is the first search engine in Ukraine that considers the user’s location,” says Sergey Petrenko, head of Yandex.Ukraine. “To deliver quality search results to our users today, we need to take into account their individual preferences and characteristics, such as location and language. Webmasters will also benefit from location-based search results by getting more traffic to quality local websites.”

Yandex tracks the website’s location based on a number of attributes, like its IP address or the owner’s contact details. Also, webmasters can specify the site’s region at the Yandex.Webmaster service.