Yandex has released a social-search iOS-application for the USA

Yandex has launched a social search application called Wonder, which combined for the iOS platform its own search algorithms with data from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, as well as with voice recognition from Nuance, writes TechCrunch.

The application is released only for the US market and as a "pure experiment." It is expected that some key Wonder technologies will also be used in other applications in the future. The Wonder application itself may appear in other markets, including Russia - it all depends on its success in the United States.

The application combines data from users of various social networks, and with the help of easily accessible API and voice service Nuance, it provides recommendations on where to go, what to see, what music to buy, and so on. It allows users to directly make purchases wherever possible - for example, in the case of music.
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The application was developed by the American team of Yandex. According to TechCrunch, immediately behind the project is a team of three people from the startup The Tweeted Times, which Yandex bought in 2011. According to the same source, the Moscow office did not take the idea seriously until the application was developed.



The Yandex blog notes that currently Wonder supports searching by places, music and news and only a few types of questions. However, the scope of the application can be extended based on user feedback.

The release of the US application helps Yandex strengthen its presence in the US market, demonstrate its ability to work with English-speaking users and with data in English. In addition, it is a way for Yandex to roll out three services to the market that will soon appear in other Yandex applications anyway.

Firstly, it is a technology, which in Yandex is called the “natural language understanding system”. It is a voice recognition service that is based on Nuance technology and that understands issues and other types of interaction.

Secondly, it is a Yandex algorithm that helps collect and integrate streams from various social networks in order to find the latest and most accurate information. “We want to look at the data of social networks without duplication and errors,” they say in Yandex.

And, thirdly, this is one more step towards aggregation: “We are experimenting with an interface in which all the information about what the user is looking for can be placed in one folder.”