Rambler Search

From 2011 Rambler used Yandex search as its base technology. On top of the base web results, Rambler developed its own search product: the results page, advertising, blocks for the group's services and other search scenarios. For specific tasks, such as news search, the team had its own search technology.

When I joined, search was already bringing Rambler significant revenue but was getting almost no product attention.

The results page had to do two things at once: help people find the answer and make money. Ads and Rambler&Co service blocks sat on the same page where people were looking for their result, so every change to the results page affected both user behaviour and revenue.

I combined product and project responsibility: I set up work with hypotheses, priorities, experiments and quarterly plans, and owned the search experience and monetization. The team grew from two developers and a half-time administrator into a full cross-functional team: engineering, design, QA, operations and distribution. The team built the ranking, models, infrastructure and interfaces.

Set up regular product work: hypotheses, priorities, experiments, quarterly plans and plan-versus-actual reviews against product and revenue metrics.

Change the results page through experiments. The new SERP first went to 25% of traffic and was compared with the previous version on user behaviour and advertising metrics.

Build Rambler&Co services directly into the results page — Kassa, Championat, Afisha, the TV guide, Organizations — and make these service blocks configurable through an admin tool so routine changes did not need developers.

I launched the integration with Google as a search provider for foreign traffic and personally led the work with its API. Yandex remained the base search for Russian users.

In 2015 we used a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) in our work on service blocks: from sets of keywords we generated variants that competed with each other, to choose the blocks' weights and improve the composition of the results page.

In our own news search we shipped a new ranking formula and started using behavioural statistics in ranking.

In 2016 we shipped the new SERP and redesigns of mobile search and Rambler Images, launched the admin tool for service blocks and kept adding new blocks — Championat, the TV guide, Afisha and later Organizations. By the end of the year advertising conversion had grown and the interface followed Rambler's common guidelines.