OREANDA-NEWS. June 20, 2012. Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) has released an app that delivers instant answers to search queries on Android smartphone devices. Users searching for ‘cafй’ on their smartphones will instantly see a map showing the nearest places to eat and drink, while those looking for weather information will immediately have the forecast for their current location. Yandex is the first web search provider to issue a mobile app that gives its users an instant answer to their questions, with a full search results page available with a tap.

“With this app, we’re introducing a novel approach to search,” says Dmitriy Kozlov, Manager of Mobile Search at Yandex. “There are questions that need answers here and now. This is especially true for mobile search. We developed Yandex.Search for Android to immediately respond to users’ queries with a quick answer conveniently displayed in the mobile format. The app understands that if someone is looking for a pharmacy on their mobile phone, they most likely need to find the nearest address, and so it shows a map with all pharmacies in the neighbourhood.”

Queries about navigation and weather, together with image and news searches, represent 15% of all queries on Yandex sent from mobile phones, according to the company’s statistics. The new Yandex.Search app provides instant answers to these types of queries. More query categories will be supported by the quick search feature in the future.

The Yandex.Search app is available to users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and can be downloaded free of charge on Google Play. Users who already have the Yandex.Search widget on their phones can upgrade it to the app version.

The new app is part of Yandex’s intent-based search program launched to teach the search engine to return results based on the user’s search intentions.