Yandex.Slovari

» see slovari.yandex.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

By 2005 the reference question already had a free answer that volunteers were writing for nothing, and any company paying publishers for the same shelf was betting that a licensed answer would stay worth more. Yandex made that bet in russian and held it for eleven years. i could not have read a word of it, and that is the smaller half of the distance, because the bigger half is that the argument it lost has since been lost everywhere.

Yandex.Slovari opened in june 2005, assembled out of two services the company had been running since 2001, a licensed dictionary product and a licensed encyclopedia product. It launched with about 2.3 million entries. By 2007 a single query went across 57 encyclopedias and dictionaries at once, and the catalog ran from the third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, all 94,541 articles of it, back to the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia printed before the revolution. Dahl's dictionary of the living russian language was in there too.

The language half came mostly from ABBYY, whose Lingvo dictionaries were written by professional linguists and licensed rather than crowdsourced. That was the selling point. A wikipedia article is written by whoever showed up, while a Lingvo entry is written by somebody paid to know. For a decade Yandex could put both in front of you in the same box.

On 24 march 2016 the company posted that Slovari was closing, and on 31 march it went off. The reason given was not traffic and not cost. It was the rights holders: the licenses did not permit partner articles inside mobile applications, and they did not permit full articles to appear in search results in any form that would have been comfortable to read.

~ the case file ~

~ the contract problem ~

Every one of those agreements was signed in a decade when a licensed encyclopedia meant a page in a browser on a desk. None of them said anything workable about a screen in a pocket, so as the traffic moved, Yandex found itself holding permission to serve content in the one place people had stopped reading it. Renegotiating fifty-odd contracts with publishers who had watched free reference eat their business was not going to end well either.

The other constraint is the more interesting one. Yandex could not show a full article in the search results, which is precisely where a modern reference lookup ends. You type the word and you read the definition without ever visiting anything. A dictionary you have to click through to was already a dictionary losing to the box above it.

~ what closed with it ~

Users had notebooks in the service, saved words they were working on, and those could be exported to a file or carried over to Yandex.Translator before the lights went out. The translator took the language side and a browser extension took some of the encyclopedic side, which is the usual arithmetic of a shutdown, where the replacement covers the function and drops the thing people actually liked.

What went was the etymology and the usage examples, the reference apparatus that tells you not only what a word means but how it has been used and by whom. That is exactly the material that costs money to produce, which is why it was licensed and why it left when the license did. The free encyclopedia is still there and still growing. The paid shelf behind it quietly went back into the buildings it came from.

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