October 29, 2018 at 10:23How Yandex tried to copy my heatmap service
About a year ago, I did such a thing as heat price maps , then I described the whole process in this article . The service turned out to be interesting, but it does not bring money at all, just a beautiful picture that clearly shows where it is expensive and where it is cheap, so to speak, an image component - for some reason, there were no analogues on our real estate sites until recently. But the other day, Yandex did the same.
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a surge in the attendance of my cards. The metric shows that people suddenly began to massively search for something like “ Yandex heat price maps ”". Well, I googled it too, and felt fear: what I considered to be my brainchild was suddenly done by Yandex, the largest IT company in Russia. And a lot of news portals screamed about it in all the search results. Of course I was intrigued, I wanted to to see how the leading IT-specialists of the Russian Federation did the same thing, and here’s what I saw :
For comparison, here’s how it looks on approximately the same scale (clickable): Maybe I made a mistake and didn’t go there, or they didn’t do something else ? But no, this is a full-fledged finished release from Yandex
which they spread through the press service on such a scale as if they had revolutionized price analytics. They even washed down ads on Vkontakte. Despite the fact that there is only the city center and incomprehensible "cheap" spots in the area. There is no way to see for which objects the colors are built, only dots with approximate prices.
There is no way to customize the display. All you can do is choose between renting and selling, plus a “payback forecast” sucked from your finger. However, there should be a choice of scale, a choice of markets: apartments, houses, plots, commerce; the opportunity to see exactly which objects are being counted, all major cities, and not just Moscow and St. Petersburg, etc.
The process of generating these cards is quite resource-intensive, and this is the main reason why I did not make all the regions, as well as many other display settings - even to draw what it takes 3 days, and the load on my only server at the same time looks like this:
Well, that is, to the eyeballs. The process starts on Friday morning and new cards are ready for every Monday.
I already described the technical nuances of the process in the original article, if anyone is interested, look there .
I am sure that Yandex does not have such problems, they have millions of ads all over Russia, colossal technical capacities and first-class specialists, who are probably better programmers than me.
In this situation, there is one point that can affect any of us, namely, if you are a programmer or designer or anyone else, and did something cool, you have no chance to tell about it - they will not listen to you. But when the conditional Yandex looks at your service and makes a copy of it, they will shout about it from all sides.
The fact is that I sent to the editorial office of many publications applications for the publication of material about my cards. None of them published a word. In most cases, they did not even answer me. In only one Roem answered, saying that it was not interesting to anyone, although a year ago they published something similar about Cyan .
So what do we see in a situation where Yandex does the same? The issue is full of news about what a cool thing he did. Everyone suddenly became interested. And of course, in none of the news is there any mention that the same thing was already done a year earlier on an unknown site.
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a surge in the attendance of my cards. The metric shows that people suddenly began to massively search for something like “ Yandex heat price maps ”". Well, I googled it too, and felt fear: what I considered to be my brainchild was suddenly done by Yandex, the largest IT company in Russia. And a lot of news portals screamed about it in all the search results. Of course I was intrigued, I wanted to to see how the leading IT-specialists of the Russian Federation did the same thing, and here’s what I saw :
For comparison, here’s how it looks on approximately the same scale (clickable): Maybe I made a mistake and didn’t go there, or they didn’t do something else ? But no, this is a full-fledged finished release from Yandex
which they spread through the press service on such a scale as if they had revolutionized price analytics. They even washed down ads on Vkontakte. Despite the fact that there is only the city center and incomprehensible "cheap" spots in the area. There is no way to see for which objects the colors are built, only dots with approximate prices.
There is no way to customize the display. All you can do is choose between renting and selling, plus a “payback forecast” sucked from your finger. However, there should be a choice of scale, a choice of markets: apartments, houses, plots, commerce; the opportunity to see exactly which objects are being counted, all major cities, and not just Moscow and St. Petersburg, etc.
Process challenges
The process of generating these cards is quite resource-intensive, and this is the main reason why I did not make all the regions, as well as many other display settings - even to draw what it takes 3 days, and the load on my only server at the same time looks like this:
Well, that is, to the eyeballs. The process starts on Friday morning and new cards are ready for every Monday.
I already described the technical nuances of the process in the original article, if anyone is interested, look there .
I am sure that Yandex does not have such problems, they have millions of ads all over Russia, colossal technical capacities and first-class specialists, who are probably better programmers than me.
About the reaction of the media
In this situation, there is one point that can affect any of us, namely, if you are a programmer or designer or anyone else, and did something cool, you have no chance to tell about it - they will not listen to you. But when the conditional Yandex looks at your service and makes a copy of it, they will shout about it from all sides.
The fact is that I sent to the editorial office of many publications applications for the publication of material about my cards. None of them published a word. In most cases, they did not even answer me. In only one Roem answered, saying that it was not interesting to anyone, although a year ago they published something similar about Cyan .
So what do we see in a situation where Yandex does the same? The issue is full of news about what a cool thing he did. Everyone suddenly became interested. And of course, in none of the news is there any mention that the same thing was already done a year earlier on an unknown site.