Search without the Internet. New beta Yandex application. Yandex mobile application - a universal assistant for iOS and Android What Yandex applications exist

Yandex has updated its proprietary application for mobile devices under Android control and iOS. The updated application is designed to become a truly universal assistant in a wide variety of everyday situations.

So, for example, in the Android application you can check where the nearest public transport stops are and what route numbers depart from them (their intervals, etc.). On this moment information about transport is available in more than 50 cities in Russia and abroad.

Great deals nearby – discounts valid in nearby stores (data provided by the Edadil service).

Poster - a list of films showing in cinemas from detailed description, reviews, and so on, while you can buy a ticket for the movie you like directly in the application.

Places nearby - shops, pharmacies, ATMs, gas stations, etc., while the operating hours of organizations are taken into account, i.e., if a particular organization is closed or will close in the very near future, then it will not be on the list, which allows Using the application, it is easy to find a 24-hour or late-night store at a late hour. You can choose and build the most optimal route to any point: on foot, by car or public transport.

Offline mode - will help out when the Internet connection is weak or completely absent (Yandex saves answers to popular search queries, allowing the user to quickly get short help, for example: phone number, address of the organization, etc.). Currently, the offline mode is only available in the iOS app; it will be available on Android later.

Yandex.Browser is free and modern browser for a computer with the Turbo loading function for “heavy” web pages at the fastest possible speed.

Download Yandex Browser for Windows 7, 8 and 10

The application was created on the famous Blink engine, which was developed and first implemented in Chrome by Google. The success of the program among the Russian-speaking audience came thanks to its minimalistic and pleasant design, as well as built-in and useful widgets for various Yandex services of its own design.

Distinctive features:

• integrated module for viewing and PDF editing, DOC, XLS, TXT and other documents;
• built-in antivirus from Kaspersky Lab, capable of scanning downloaded content and separately downloaded files;
• on the panel there is fast access to the weather, e-mail, viewing traffic jams, entering cloud storage(disk), as well as “smart” search;
• built-in Adguard extension with a lifetime license (included in Settings - Add-ons, Ad blocking section).

You can download Yandex browser from the official website for free in Russian for Windows 7, 8 and 10 OS of any bit depth using the links below. The installation is standard and default.

The mobile browser of Yandex Corporation has become popular and has gained a leading position in the RuNet. Provides users of Android mobile devices with instant opening of even very busy web pages of sites on smartphones and tablets using Turbo 2.0 mode. For the convenience of users, the free web browser Yandex.Browser easily and quietly adapts the site page to the size of the phone screen.

Especially on mobile devices, there is increased attention to security and the Protect technology will warn the user in the event of a dangerous site and also block the transfer of personal data through an open Wi-Fi network.

On free mobile browser there is additional synchronization with other user devices with the ability to restore data even after re-installation via an APK file or Market. All built-in and additional official extensions can be downloaded without registration and in Russian.

Download Yandex browser on iPhone and iPad

Latest version of the application on iOS system makes opening and browsing websites as comfortable as possible, loading even large pages much faster. iPad and iPhone users are offered the functionality " smart line» for entering queries using the keyboard or voice, a powerful system of recommendations for interests and protection against any malicious data. The modern and simple interface style makes the free Yandex.Browser fast and convenient.

The developers have introduced so-called configurations into the program for simultaneous use on several mobile devices. Yandex browser is updated frequently and therefore it is important to monitor and always install the new, current version.

You can install Yandex Browser on your computer for free using the latest official version using the link below. It is recommended to set the default to system disk C for stable operation of the application.

Yandex is all the services of the company of the same name, collected in one application.

Usage

Installing the Yandex application on a smartphone or tablet with Android will allow the user to keep abreast of all the latest news, instantly gain access to fresh and interesting content, and also keep the most frequently used services at hand. Multitasking and convenience are the main advantages of the Yandex application.

Functional

Once upon a time people really liked to talk on the phone, but then this telephone conversations changed messengers and text messages. In recent years, “conversations” with portable equipment have gained particular popularity. Why press buttons, giving commands, if the same thing can be done faster and more conveniently - by voice?

If you want to quickly find something on the Internet, but typing text is inconvenient, contact the voice assistant Alice - she will fulfill your request, suggest a way out of a difficult situation, and even cheer you up. Yandex will not let you miss important notifications - the application will compile a summary of personalized news, warn you about sudden changes in weather conditions, “hot” news that excites the public, and also tell you about current exchange rates.

In addition, you can use it to track discounts on goods, check new interesting events in your city, book tickets and even look for interesting places nearby. To make working with the program easier, use the collection of widgets - their presence on the desktop Android desktop allows you to quickly access the most important functions.

Key Features

• managing the search engine using ;
• obtaining information about the current weather and upcoming forecasts;
• formation of a news feed in accordance with the user’s tastes;
• obtaining information about interesting places nearby;
• viewing a map and transport schedule;
• information about events, discounts and exchange rates;
• compatible with all current versions Android.

Many of us still find ourselves in situations where we need to quickly find important information, but internet access is limited or non-existent. It’s one thing to try to open an entertaining post on a website, and quite another to look for a phone number hotline bank or hospital. Today, for the first time, I will tell Habr readers about how the acceleration of search in the Yandex application has led to the ability to search for important information without the Internet.

But first, you need to understand the main thing: why did we even undertake offline search if the sites from the search results are still inaccessible in the absence of a network?

EDGE search

Yandex's radar traditionally shows people who enter a query, but then leave the page without waiting for it to load due to poor mobile internet. In this situation, we could not influence the overall quality of the network and the loading speed of all sites, but it was worth trying to make at least the search process less painful and save some time. Actually, that’s why this project was originally called EDGE search, i.e. search on slow internet.

There are two ways to speed up your search. First, optimize the web version and the APIs that the application uses as much as possible. And this work is also being done, but even this is not enough. Secondly, you can pre-load onto your device something that will be useful in case of a poor connection. Obviously, it is physically impossible to fit the entire Internet index into a phone. Therefore, it was necessary to go from the local storage of ready-made search results for specific queries. Which ones? No one yet knows how to predict a person’s future needs with high accuracy (but we are learning). Therefore, we take popular recurring queries.

When we talk about popular queries, many people imagine a [VKontakte] query and several similar ones. In fact, we have hundreds of thousands of less obvious requests that are regularly repeated in large quantities. And this is already many hundreds of megabytes of results. Moreover, we planned to save not only the search results, but also the hints that appear during the process of entering a query. And here many will ask: why store hints offline, since a person is quite capable of entering a query without them?

When entering queries in the Yandex application, users do not see ordinary search suggestions, but in the form of individual words/pairs of words (i.e. predictive text input). Regular hints cannot be edited: if you need to add a word, you will have to enter the entire query yourself. Hints in the form of words allow you to make edits, cover a much larger number of queries and significantly speed up their entry by a person.

But the main thing is that the tips turned out to be especially useful when working offline. These hints help people phrase their question in a way that most people do, which in turn increases the chance that the answer will be retrieved from the local cache. That is why it was important to save the tips.

Empirically, we have selected a certain minimum search queries(about 150 thousand) and hints, less than which there was no point in keeping. But the volume of all this luggage was still beyond decent (several hundred megabytes). Even taking into account the fact that only the top 10 results were stored for each query. Something had to be done.

From optimization to offline

We started looking for everything that could be sent “under the knife.” Each result contained not only links to sites, but also favicons and snippets. Favicons are pictures, which means serious savings could be achieved here. The same site can appear in the results for completely different queries, so we initially did not duplicate favicons, but stored them by site. And then we made it so that the probability of saving the favicon is directly proportional to the frequency of the site appearing in search results. In other words, we abandoned most of the favicons, but visually this is not very noticeable.

The more we reduced organic search results in favor of ready-made answers, the closer we came to understanding that our EDGE search was no longer just speeding up the work, but was capable of answering a wide range of questions without an Internet connection at all. Without noticing it, we were already working on offline search. This means that you have to rely on ready-made answers. Having realized this, we began to enrich the database with important facts that previously could not get there due to limited popularity of the request. These results contain only answers, without issuing sites.

Using a similar scheme, we copied into the database all the object response cards and all requests for which the object response is available. Offline search cards differ from the originals in the almost complete absence of pictures: we removed them for reasons of economy.

The growth of the fact base required further work over the optimization of such a data storage structure that would be careful about device resources.

Dictionaries

The database is not downloaded to the device as a whole, but in the form of separate dictionaries, and only with a Wi-Fi connection and only with a sufficient charge level. The division into dictionaries was made for two reasons. Firstly, if the connection breaks during downloading, then during the next attempt only those dictionaries will be downloaded that were not downloaded earlier. Secondly, to further save space, the database is downloaded and stored on the device in a compressed form, but with each request it is not unpacked entirely, but only in the necessary parts.

Each dictionary contains queries starting with certain letters, as well as all the data for search results and hints for these queries. It turned out to be more logical to sort the data before dividing it into dictionaries by the first letters of queries than, for example, by their popularity. Imagine the situation: the first dictionary contains the most popular queries, the second contains slightly less popular ones, and so on. But the popularity of queries often changes, and this will lead to the need to regularly update dictionaries just to move a query from one to another. This costs traffic, energy and time. Therefore, it was important to ensure that when updating the database, queries did not move between dictionaries. Alphabetical order turned out to be a simple and effective solution.

Answers to the same queries may vary in different parts of the country, so different dictionaries are formed for different regions. Moreover, during short-term visits to another region, the application will not rush to update dictionaries - we have provided scenarios for business trips and tourism.

No matter how hard we try, offline search does not cover all possible queries, but it already helps out on average with every third one. As with any average result, this means that some users encounter offline responses much more often than others. Therefore, we, of course, allow you to completely disable offline search in the settings.

Our team would be interested to know the opinion of Habr readers about this direction and to receive feedback on the work of the beta

Yandex is a program that allows the user to minimum terms find out the latest news, exchange rates and other necessary information. The application requires an Internet connection.

Basic information

For Yandex to work fully on Android, you should allow the application to learn about the location of your mobile device. Thanks to geolocation data, the user will be able to see on the screen:

• weather;
• traffic congestion, traffic jams;
• discounts in stores located nearby;
• addresses of nearby shopping departments, entertainment centers, catering outlets, museums, theaters, gas stations, ATMs and pharmacies.

Built-in voice assistant

The application has a built-in voice assistant- Alice. It is presented to the user when the program is launched for the first time on Android. Alice is able to instantly dial the number of an ambulance, rescue service or fire department if such a request is received. Without going into a search, she can tell you: where there are currently traffic jams, what time it is at the moment, what the current dollar exchange rate is and how old Paul McCartney is.

Alice can do quite a lot of things, among which the most popular are:

• singing songs, rapping;
• voicing toasts for festive events;
• participation in various games;
• issuing information about time in different cities;
• simple communication with the user of a mobile device.

What opportunities are opening up?

In the profile menu you can find popular sections - settings, photo auto-upload, setting the current location, scanner, Mail, Money and Yandex Disk. It is possible to independently set data parameters that will subsequently be displayed on the main screen of the application. Information about train schedules, TV programs and posters, current news and events of the day is available online.

The application can save money internal memory phone or tablet. After installing Yandex on mobile device, the user will not have to additionally download some programs. For example, applications that inform about discounts in nearby stores or broadcast TV shows online will no longer be relevant. You no longer have to enter a combination of words in a search engine about quick or dietary recipes, zoning and creating a cozy interior in a living space, fashion trends in clothing and shoes - all this can be found on home page downloaded browser.