Russia’s Yandex: User personification to play key role in e-services

MOSCOW, Dec 27 (PRIME) -- The main goals and challenges for all online services today is to offer personalized approach in addressing users’ queries in any circumstance regardless of the season, the region and on any device, whether it is a smartphone, a desktop or a TV set, a spokesperson for Russian Internet giant Yandex told PRIME on Tuesday.

“A strong pool of technologies such as machine learning and image recognition are a great help in reaching these goals. The other strong pillar for the online services is the users’ feedback and engagement. People contribute to making services for other people. For example, Yandex.Probki gathers and includes feedback of users into the product,” the spokesperson said.

Yandex.Probki is Yandex’s service of road traffic information where users themselves contribute information on road situation.

“First of all, any technological company needs to involve its users if it wants to develop a good service or product. All search engines in Russia and worldwide try to take into account feedback on stores or hotels, books and films, in order to give better search results. The Internet has become big and diverse.”

“Second, people want to get a personal assistant from a search engine rather than just a list of irrelevant links. People want to tackle their issues in a fewer number of clicks and faster.”

“This means that search engines must be able to do three things: be able to understand user requests in any form, whether it’s a text, a spoken phrase or an image. The response or a follow-up question from the search engine must come very quickly. The requested content must become available on any device. This means that a person can start watching a video on a TV set in the evening and continue watching it on a smartphone in the morning.”

Third, more and more people do their search from a mobile device. In fact, a smartphone has become the only device to surf the Internet for many people, the Yandex spokesperson said, adding that the trend has started some five or six years ago.

“A smartphone is a personal device and carries a lot more knowledge of the users’ patterns than a desktop. This gives more personalized search results on a smartphone. Also, smartphones can deal with more complicated technological tasks as their memory capacity rises,” the spokesperson said.

The share of payments from mobile devices is also growing. According to Yandex.Money, a payment service that is a joint venture between Yandex and Sberbank, some 40% of e-wallet users make payments via a mobile phone.

“Contactless payments are becoming more popular. Currently, a third of contactless payments in Russia are done in Moscow, but the total geography is much wider and covers over 40 countries,” the Yandex spokesperson said.

“An average check of a contactless payment is 708 rubles. A fingerprint serves as the ID. In the future, biometry can be used as an ID for various methods and ways of payments.”

(60.9084 rubles – U.S. $1)

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