Yandex launches people finder

Wed 22 February 2012 10:00, Tamara Yadvichuk

On February 20th. Yandex announced the launch of its new people search in beta. This feature will allow Yandex users to look for people’s profiles on various social media and refine their search by specifying the city, age and places where the person in question studied or worked. Yandex says it will only search through public profiles – so that nobody’s privacy is violated.

As many internet users have accounts on multiple social media, Yandex offers to group these accounts together in search results. However, their owners have to interlink their accounts manually (for example, add a URL of their Facebook account to the personal info on VKontakte), or register their multiple social media accounts on social.yandex – if they want to be easily found, of course.

I tried looking for myself using various spellings of my name in English and Russian and found my profiles on Facebook and VKontakte, but not on Twitter, LinkedIn or numerous other social services I have registered with throughout my online history. I didn’t get more results even after following Yandex’s suggestions on how to group several accounts together on social.yandex. But hey, the service has been on for only two days and it is still in beta. As Yandex reports on its company blog, people search is only a part of their ongoing work to allow the search through the information publicly shared on social networks.

I’ll keep you posted on Yandex’s new developments. In the meantime, enjoy this Russian-language video introducing the new people search feature.

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