Yandex Islands Beta: "We want to give meaning to any element on the search results page"
Today is a beta version of the Islands of Yandex . This is a platform with a new interface and interactive answers that are designed to make it easier for people to solve their problems.
We will open access to the beta gradually: today, everyone who requested access to it will begin to receive their invites after the platform announcement in May.
On this occasion, especially for Habr, we interviewed Taras Sharov, the project manager of the “Islands”. He spoke about the principles and history of the platform, as well as why Yandex started such a serious update of the type of search results.
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Hi, Taras. Tell us what the “Islands” platform is and why we are returning to this topic today.
Islands are a product, a platform, and an interface. At YaC / m, we talked about the platform. Today we open the beta, in which we launch the "island" interface and a number of interactive answers. Everything that we are doing right now is perceived as a product that exists on three platforms: desktops, tablets and mobile devices. So all the solutions that we are currently ready to present in our beta will work everywhere.
How did it happen that you became the head of this project?
It turned out by chance. About a year and a half ago, we started a project that was supposed to lift restrictions that could hinder the further development of the search page functionality. The project was made aside from the main search and developed in a sense as a startup inside Janex. We had an idea that we gradually developed. First came the inner prototype, without design. Then we created the first version of the design and launched it on yandex.com. We looked at the first results, used it ourselves, made some conclusions and started working on the second version. At this point, we have already formulated the first principles that dealt with blocks on the issue and what the interface should contain. And somewhere in the period of the second approach, we had a product idea that interactive responses can be developed not only by our own forces, but also by the webmasters themselves. So during the third approach, we have already worked, taking into account that the platform is designed specifically for webmasters, that is, for a crowdsourcing development mode.
You said about the interactivity of the answers. Tell me what you can do on the search results page?
During the announcement, we talked about three basic ideas. The first is the forms that we draw directly on the search results. The second is the key part of the response we receive from content sites. And the third - transactions directly on issue. At the moment we are launching the third stage, i.e. forms on our issue.
Webmasters could try to create islands for their sites from the moment they announced on YaC / m. Tell me how many examples gathered in two months?
The response exceeded our expectations. In the sandbox, which we launched simultaneously with the announcement, came several thousand webmasters who created their own test islands. After we had reviewed them all, removed duplicates, removed completely broken options, we had several hundred really good solutions. We have started to work on some of them and plan to continue moving along this list.
And how do we decide which islands will fall on the issue?
At the moment we are doing this, as they say, manually, because, on the one hand, we want to better understand the needs of users, and on the other, the needs of webmasters. In the future we plan to formulate clear rules and automate the process so that the islands can be launched in large volumes.
You said that the appearance of the islands was formed gradually. Tell me how it happened that they look like this in the end.
Studying our own answers, the composition of the data, we came to some composite model. It has an early part of the answer, our classic answer, within which we can select a key part of it, and proposed solutions, which may already be in the form of some ready-made solutions, or in the form of an interactive form.
If we are talking about the appearance of the interactive form, here those webmasters who created several thousand islands helped us a lot. It was a very good study material: after watching all this, we understood how to formulate the first guides to create islands.
Do interactive responses somehow influence Direct? For example, will any elements of interactivity appear in it?
Now we are primarily engaged in the user part, so that users receive convenient answers that help them reduce the time to solve the problem. We will deal with monetization after this. But in general, we do not exclude that the islands will appear in Direct. We have always proceeded from the fact that Direct is also part of the response to the user to his request.
Many webmasters fear that the Islands will take away their traffic. We talked a lot about this already, but repeat once again: what will happen in reality?
The better Yandex, within the framework of vertical services, does search or selection tools, the better it becomes for partner sites that participate in this and receive targeted traffic. This is confirmed by all our experiences: Market, Auto, etc. In addition, interactive answers help to solve the problem (to take the first step on the way to the solution), but not to replace the site with Yandex.
And why don’t we generate the islands ourselves, but the webmaster decides what island will be at his site, and will there be any?
This is our such philosophy - participation in this program is purely voluntary. The second reason is that no one better than the webmaster himself understands the meaning of the work of his site. And the third is further support and development. A webmaster, having created an interactive island, will be interested in further developing it, improving it, etc.
They asked a lot about whether the islands will affect the ranking. What can you say about this?
Directly islands do not affect the ranking. If they are able to change something, in the long term. This means that if you have created a truly convenient, human-solving island problem, the user will prefer your answer to any other. In the long run, this is precisely what can affect the fact that it is your answer that will begin to rise in extradition.
And how do we understand that the answers in the format of the islands will be useful to people?
We conducted a series of studies in our laboratory. What we did: we invited two categories of users, one of which is youth, and the second is middle-aged users. All of them showed the old search results page and a new one and set certain tasks.
We measured the positions of the first and second clicks, the time to these clicks, built maps of views and the trajectory of fixing attention. Also, in an open questionnaire mode, people talked about the feelings that they experienced using the new issue.
And what results did you get?
The first is that both categories of users work more efficiently with the new issue. The second - in my opinion, this is very cool - to a direct question: “Did you notice, maybe something changed in the interface?” - people did not pay attention that it changed. That is, we coped so well with the task of preserving the habit that people did not notice the substitution.
I liked how people use the new left column, which switches the verticals. This is a new design element, but it is so organically incorporated into the entire new issue that people use it on the machine. Moreover, when they are grabbed by the hand and asked what they have done now, they answer: “Something, I've returned to search.” In my opinion, the fact that people immediately begin to use something new is a very good result.
One of the notable changes for many was that the icons of the sites moved to the right. Tell me, what guided you when you decided to do it?
This is our next interface experiment. We want to give meaning to any element found on the search results page. To understand what I'm talking about, you need to compare the old design with the new one. In the old design, the favicon largely plays the role of a bullet in the list, focusing on which, the person begins to read the snippet. In the new interface, we wanted the favicon to be a signal that really means something to the user. Therefore, favicons are now shown not for all sites, but for those that can really help the user. And precisely in order for people to stop perceiving them as bullets, we carried them to the right.
So, this is the very “relevant interface” concept that you talked about at the Islands presentation in May? Tell me more about it.
Good. Look: life does not become easier. The Internet universe is expanding, the number of services is increasing - Yandex itself has managed to develop about six dozen. When you ask for a search, we mix for you the results that we found on the Internet with the results we received from our own services. What did we want to build? We wanted to build an interface that will help break your request into subtopics and services that can really respond well at this moment. This idea lies in the interface that we tried to build. That is, you ask, and he “prints out” to you a certain knowledge about what he knows about your request and nothing else but this. That is, when you change a request, the interface changes completely.
We will open access to the beta gradually: today, everyone who requested access to it will begin to receive their invites after the platform announcement in May.
On this occasion, especially for Habr, we interviewed Taras Sharov, the project manager of the “Islands”. He spoke about the principles and history of the platform, as well as why Yandex started such a serious update of the type of search results.
')
Hi, Taras. Tell us what the “Islands” platform is and why we are returning to this topic today.
Islands are a product, a platform, and an interface. At YaC / m, we talked about the platform. Today we open the beta, in which we launch the "island" interface and a number of interactive answers. Everything that we are doing right now is perceived as a product that exists on three platforms: desktops, tablets and mobile devices. So all the solutions that we are currently ready to present in our beta will work everywhere.
How did it happen that you became the head of this project?
It turned out by chance. About a year and a half ago, we started a project that was supposed to lift restrictions that could hinder the further development of the search page functionality. The project was made aside from the main search and developed in a sense as a startup inside Janex. We had an idea that we gradually developed. First came the inner prototype, without design. Then we created the first version of the design and launched it on yandex.com. We looked at the first results, used it ourselves, made some conclusions and started working on the second version. At this point, we have already formulated the first principles that dealt with blocks on the issue and what the interface should contain. And somewhere in the period of the second approach, we had a product idea that interactive responses can be developed not only by our own forces, but also by the webmasters themselves. So during the third approach, we have already worked, taking into account that the platform is designed specifically for webmasters, that is, for a crowdsourcing development mode.
You said about the interactivity of the answers. Tell me what you can do on the search results page?
During the announcement, we talked about three basic ideas. The first is the forms that we draw directly on the search results. The second is the key part of the response we receive from content sites. And the third - transactions directly on issue. At the moment we are launching the third stage, i.e. forms on our issue.
Webmasters could try to create islands for their sites from the moment they announced on YaC / m. Tell me how many examples gathered in two months?
The response exceeded our expectations. In the sandbox, which we launched simultaneously with the announcement, came several thousand webmasters who created their own test islands. After we had reviewed them all, removed duplicates, removed completely broken options, we had several hundred really good solutions. We have started to work on some of them and plan to continue moving along this list.
And how do we decide which islands will fall on the issue?
At the moment we are doing this, as they say, manually, because, on the one hand, we want to better understand the needs of users, and on the other, the needs of webmasters. In the future we plan to formulate clear rules and automate the process so that the islands can be launched in large volumes.
You said that the appearance of the islands was formed gradually. Tell me how it happened that they look like this in the end.
Studying our own answers, the composition of the data, we came to some composite model. It has an early part of the answer, our classic answer, within which we can select a key part of it, and proposed solutions, which may already be in the form of some ready-made solutions, or in the form of an interactive form.
If we are talking about the appearance of the interactive form, here those webmasters who created several thousand islands helped us a lot. It was a very good study material: after watching all this, we understood how to formulate the first guides to create islands.
Do interactive responses somehow influence Direct? For example, will any elements of interactivity appear in it?
Now we are primarily engaged in the user part, so that users receive convenient answers that help them reduce the time to solve the problem. We will deal with monetization after this. But in general, we do not exclude that the islands will appear in Direct. We have always proceeded from the fact that Direct is also part of the response to the user to his request.
Many webmasters fear that the Islands will take away their traffic. We talked a lot about this already, but repeat once again: what will happen in reality?
The better Yandex, within the framework of vertical services, does search or selection tools, the better it becomes for partner sites that participate in this and receive targeted traffic. This is confirmed by all our experiences: Market, Auto, etc. In addition, interactive answers help to solve the problem (to take the first step on the way to the solution), but not to replace the site with Yandex.
And why don’t we generate the islands ourselves, but the webmaster decides what island will be at his site, and will there be any?
This is our such philosophy - participation in this program is purely voluntary. The second reason is that no one better than the webmaster himself understands the meaning of the work of his site. And the third is further support and development. A webmaster, having created an interactive island, will be interested in further developing it, improving it, etc.
They asked a lot about whether the islands will affect the ranking. What can you say about this?
Directly islands do not affect the ranking. If they are able to change something, in the long term. This means that if you have created a truly convenient, human-solving island problem, the user will prefer your answer to any other. In the long run, this is precisely what can affect the fact that it is your answer that will begin to rise in extradition.
And how do we understand that the answers in the format of the islands will be useful to people?
We conducted a series of studies in our laboratory. What we did: we invited two categories of users, one of which is youth, and the second is middle-aged users. All of them showed the old search results page and a new one and set certain tasks.
We measured the positions of the first and second clicks, the time to these clicks, built maps of views and the trajectory of fixing attention. Also, in an open questionnaire mode, people talked about the feelings that they experienced using the new issue.
And what results did you get?
The first is that both categories of users work more efficiently with the new issue. The second - in my opinion, this is very cool - to a direct question: “Did you notice, maybe something changed in the interface?” - people did not pay attention that it changed. That is, we coped so well with the task of preserving the habit that people did not notice the substitution.
I liked how people use the new left column, which switches the verticals. This is a new design element, but it is so organically incorporated into the entire new issue that people use it on the machine. Moreover, when they are grabbed by the hand and asked what they have done now, they answer: “Something, I've returned to search.” In my opinion, the fact that people immediately begin to use something new is a very good result.
One of the notable changes for many was that the icons of the sites moved to the right. Tell me, what guided you when you decided to do it?
This is our next interface experiment. We want to give meaning to any element found on the search results page. To understand what I'm talking about, you need to compare the old design with the new one. In the old design, the favicon largely plays the role of a bullet in the list, focusing on which, the person begins to read the snippet. In the new interface, we wanted the favicon to be a signal that really means something to the user. Therefore, favicons are now shown not for all sites, but for those that can really help the user. And precisely in order for people to stop perceiving them as bullets, we carried them to the right.
So, this is the very “relevant interface” concept that you talked about at the Islands presentation in May? Tell me more about it.
Good. Look: life does not become easier. The Internet universe is expanding, the number of services is increasing - Yandex itself has managed to develop about six dozen. When you ask for a search, we mix for you the results that we found on the Internet with the results we received from our own services. What did we want to build? We wanted to build an interface that will help break your request into subtopics and services that can really respond well at this moment. This idea lies in the interface that we tried to build. That is, you ask, and he “prints out” to you a certain knowledge about what he knows about your request and nothing else but this. That is, when you change a request, the interface changes completely.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/187716/
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