OREANDA-NEWS. December 15, 2010. Russia's leading search engine Yandex has developed and launched a new search technology, Spectrum. It allows to infer implicit queries and return matching search results. So, a user's search query [beethoven] retrieves both the composer's biography and his music along with the film Beethoven.

Spectrum is based on query statistics. The system analyses users' searches and identifies objects like personal names, films or cars. Each object is then classified into one or more categories, e.g. 'film', 'car', 'medicine'. For each category there is a range of search intents. So, the 'product' category will have search intents such as buy something or read customer reviews.

Performing a search for a user query with many potential meanings, Yandex's engine chooses the category and the range of potential user intents for this query. Based on this information, Spectrum returns results that match user's expectations as close as possible. Proportions of the search results responding to different user intents are based on the user demand for these results. So, if the majority of users searching for [gone with the wind] expect to find a film, the majority of search results will be about the film, not the book.

As users' interests and intents tend to change, the system performs query analysis several times a week. Using the power of over a thousand processor cores, each time Spectrum analyses about five billion search queries.