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"Last month, Russian Internet giant Yandex unveiled Islands, a feature that brings interactive snippets of content to its search engine, and now it\u00A0has been released in beta across three countries.\r\n\r\nThe idea behind Islands is to provide a richer set of search results to give users more options and details relating to websites that show up.\u00A0Islands initially launched in Turkey only, but it is available to users in Russia and Ukraine too.\r\n\r\nThe feature currently covers search, images, video and the main Yandex page, but that will expand to other services in time, the company says.\r\n\r\nEssentially website managers can make their search results more compelling for users.\u00A0For example, by providing options for a site that users can take advantage before they actually click through -- like logging into a Russian Airlines account from the search results page.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nYandex previously explained that there are different types of Islands, ranging from search snippets, which are basic descriptions that appear below each search result. Site links can also be added to allow users to navigate to specific pages. Finally, there are interactive snippets which present more advanced options, such as logging into accounts from the search results page.\r\n\r\nThe company says that Islands is available across all devices -- computers, tablets and smartphones -- though it will take a while to make its way to the company's full set of core markets. Since it has a beta tag, we can expect more features and tweaks to come too.\r\n\r\nIslands is another impressive piece of engineering from Yandex, which previously launched Shell\u00A0\u2013\u00A0a Facebook Home-like launcher app for Android devices \u2014 and partnered with Opera\u00A0to promote the Android ecosystem in Eastern Europe.\r\n\r\nThe company is the dominant search provider in many Eastern European markets, but it gained worldwide attention last year when\u00A0it released Wonder, a voice-controlled search app for Facebook. Despite the positive reviews it was little\u00A0wonder\u00A0that Facebook cut the app\u2019s access to its API,\u00A0leading to its withdrawal\u00A0from the App Store.\r\n\r\nThis week has been notable at Yandex for tragic reasons. Company\u00A0co-founder and CTO\u00A0Ilya Segalovich passed away\u00A0on Thursday after losing his battle with cancer.\r\n\r\nHeadline image via Thinkstock"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/eu/2013/07/26/yandexs-islands-goes-into-beta-now-providing-feature-rich-search-results-in-3-countries/>