Beta

    "Well, let me go home ... it still won’t be better ... no, I don’t want apples, I don’t want croissants, I WANT HOME! .. noooo, I can’t ... and generally, it's Saturday night." Yes, it was Saturday night. Desert Rambler building. I am a designer. One on one. We, more precisely, he did the main page of the Rambler.Beta project. I stubbornly did not accept the abstractions that turned out. Of course, karma plus the desire to break out of gloomy casemates was higher than the desire to do what I would call my portfolio. Result - I lost. I didn’t get a design from him. X called. By the 2nd night the design was done. With an orange helmet and a cherry from the cake.

    The coveted child is born in agony. The appearance of bugs is directly proportional to the approach to the hour-X. Permanent testing. For the next project I will buy a blanket for our QA-managers (we have a sofa). However, they will not need it. They sleep like Zhukov in the hours of the capture of Berlin - always on their feet. Why changes come at the very last moment, are corrected lively. It looks like an operation without anesthesia. Unpleasant. Although ... the child is welcome, then flour is joy.

    The self-gambling state from nighttime dilutions in the office ceased on Sunday evening. You know, and we probably won’t launch the project. Our colors are starving. This is a diagnosis. This colorful phrase hides the reduction of queries from BackEnd (those who don’t know are hundreds of computers. They spit out what they found in the index in response to a query). All night, the backends fed on the energy of Unixoids, who took courage to feed them, and finally ate at dinner (and the latter went to bed), and the project was poured out.

    What is beta? Beta is Rambler’s experimental site where we test our ideas for improving traditional search and a number of other projects. Other companies have Google.Labs or Yandex.Nano (however, the latter is not particularly active). So why do you need this new search?

    The fact is that ordinary, full-text search engines process various kinds of data that are “vacuum-cleaned” from the Web, using uniform approaches. In this case, the data is “normalized” and lose their structure. The search results in a dump, namely different sources. Different in essence and structure. For example, catalogs, news sites, product descriptions on manufacturers' websites, unclean link washes, etc. Apart from the date or relevance, there is no way to sort this data. I'm not talking about their relevance and completeness.

    So, vertical search is a lot of specialized ones, i.e. on a specific topic, searches that are “implanted” into the body of a traditional search. For example, you enter “Mazda”, the search engine shows not only the results of a full-text search, but the prices of new and used Mazda, manufacturers news, reviews and test drives, owner reviews, etc. This approach combines the comprehensiveness of the theme, completeness and relevance ( which for example is important for car prices). In addition, each vertical allows you to structure data (select, sort) based on its subject. For example, in vacancies by salary, employer, type of work, etc. If this is news, then by topic news, date, etc.

    There are still a number of features in the new beta search. For example, previews. From each page we select the picture that most closely matches the search query. At beta.rambler.ru see example queries. The search results are very visual. As one of the users joked, now you can watch porn without visiting sites. Another feature - when you enter a query, the search engine itself selects the most relevant verticals. For example, Vladimir Putin is unlikely to be found in reviews. More likely - Wikipedia and news. By the way, at the bottom of SERP, developing the principle of openness, we added the ability to search in other search engines.

    What users are talking about, and they are, to my surprise, very active (up to 50-70 opinions per day, apart from what comes in ICQ), I will write a little later. In general, if possible, please see the beta and make a number of comments, better than critical. They can be sent to my ICQ, but it is better to leave here in the comments. The more critical the better. The author of the most critical (and objective) comment (comments on positioning, interface logic, ranking are especially welcome) will receive a prize from me personally :)

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