OREANDA-NEWS.  February 20, 2012. Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) today announced its social networking search program, aimed at enhancing its search engine’s quality by adding content from social networking websites. Today, Yandex rolled out a beta version of its people finder. Yandex web users in Russia can now view all public profiles of a person with accounts on the country’s most popular social networking and blogging websites, such as VKontakte, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Odnoklassniki.

Yandex processes over two million people searches daily. About one half of these search queries are to find information about celebrities, while the other half ask about someone’s friend, a contact, an employee or a partner. In response to these queries, Yandex delivers links to personal profiles on social networking websites available for public access – only those pages that can be indexed by a search engine. Currently, Yandex’s index has about 250 million personal profile pages hosted on various blogging platforms and social networking websites.

If more than one personal profile matches the user’s search query, Yandex adds one of the profiles to the top of its search results page and shows all others on a separate page. This page also features search options such as age, location, or workplace to quickly refine search results. If multiple profiles exist for the same person, they are grouped together in the search results.

“It is so much more convenient to see multiple profiles of the same person grouped together,” says Alexander Chubinskiy, Project Manager at Yandex. “Yandex does this grouping with care – only those profiles that refer to one another get grouped. Web users can choose if they want their profiles on different websites to appear in search results separately, or as grouped together. So, if one of your personal profiles refers to others, the icons of those websites on which they are hosted will appear on the same thumbnail. Conversely, the user can remove cross-reference from their personal pages so that each of the profiles appears in Yandex’s search results independently.”

In addition to finding old friends and contacts, Yandex’s people search offers web users an opportunity to see their online profiles the way other people see them, and either edit them or change their privacy settings on the website that hosts the profile.

Read more about Yandex’s social networking search engine on the company blog (in Russian).