There is everything, but not what you are looking for

Good day, friends!

I am 22 years old, I am a graduate student. All my conscious life I used the Yandex search engine. But the amount of information on the start page of the search engine reached such a size that I decided to change the appearance of the start page. I wanted to leave only the search bar and nothing more. It took me a long time to understand the settings of the Yandex search page. Of course, this outraged me and prompted the idea to figure out which start page of which search engine is sharpened to help the user find what he went to the Internet for and who wants to maximally divert the user's attention to the third-party information stream and their own services.

Let's start with the leader of Runet Yandex.



The Yandex start page looks just like that for an ordinary Runet user who did not try to change anything.

The “settings” tab immediately rises in the upper right corner.



If you go into the settings of the blocks, then we will see the following settings:



If you move all the sliders to the left, click save and reload the page, then, at first glance, nothing has changed except Yandex.Zen.



Until recently, I only knew about Yandex Zen. I thought that Yandex.Zen is an endless news feed, if you scroll down, and all the other blocks are what interferes with me on the screen. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that all the blocks listed on this settings tab are inserted between Yandex.Zen blocks. I am more than sure that 85-90% of users aged 18-30 years, like me, have no idea about these blocks and have never used them. And I did not immediately figure out where these blocks are, which I turned off.



But what I noticed right after disabling these blocks was that these services still distract me. At first, I thought that setting blocks did not work. It turns out that this is called “notifications” and is configured separately.



I have strong doubts that this is for “user convenience”. The feeling that this is so that it is more difficult for the user to disable these services.

Okay, all the same, I wanted to keep only the search bar. But the blocks near the search line cannot be deleted on yandex.ru. Just collapse them.


This is the maximum that I managed to achieve on the day when I decided to tackle this issue. And this is definitely not the result that I expected to see.

The next day I gave the same quest to my girlfriend. After 8 minutes I got the result:



Yes, that is exactly what I wanted. But this is not in the settings. Neither in the settings of the yandex.ru page, nor in the settings of Yandex.Browser.

That's where it was:



On the Yandex services tab, you need to scroll to the very bottom.



This turns out to be a special search, which is located on another domain (ya.ru). And the team that worked on the search start page and its settings made every effort so that the user would not accidentally stumble upon this kind of search page. And if he wanted something like that, he would try pretty hard.

It is worth noting that in Yandex.Browser, even if you turn off yandex.ru autoload and leave only the scoreboard, you cannot turn off Yandex.Zen and the ad banner, which pops up every now and then.



Unfortunately, Yandex’s policy is not aimed at helping to find what the user needs, but at imposing third-party information through advertising, news, and its own various services.

Business, there is business, you say, but let's compare the start pages of world and Russian leaders in search engines.


Google


Yahoo


Bing


DuckDuckGo


Mail.ru


Rambler.ru

The catastrophic overload of Russian search services with third-party information is frankly striking. And very upsetting is the extremely aggressive imposition of their own services.

The conclusion is obvious: the

start pages of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo are focused on the user's request.
Yahoo, Mail.ru, Rambler, Yandex - to distract the user's attention from the search query.