Yandex has made a major step towards internationalization of the search engine with rolling out the new search platform ‘Reykjavík’.

Reykyavík is built to deliver search results based on the user’s language preferences. This means it will display more English results for users who often visit English web resources. The company calls this the ‘first step towards personalized search’, I call it the first step towards internationalization.

Denis Raskovalov, head of Search Quality Development at Yandex, states the following:

According to our stats, most people prefer receiving answers to their queries in their own language. But there are also those who deliberately want the answers in English.

According to the stats from Yandex’s new search platform, about 8% users of Yandex prefer search results in English. That means there’s a lot of growth possible among these users. With this new step focusing on recognizing user languages by search behavior, Yandex could be preparing for a growth among English language users worldwide and possibly for integrating more languages in the future.

See: State of Search