• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 6, 2013

It could become every brand advertiser's dream: Keep searchers on query pages longer than a few seconds. Rather than the query providing the funnel to the landing page, it becomes the destination. What would paid-search marketers pay to stay with searchers 60 seconds longer?

Book a restaurant reservation, check airline flight status, pay a bill or make a doctor's appointment directly from the search page results. Russia's search engine Yandex said Thursday that it now allows webmasters to embed interactive snippets directly in the SERPs to enable that function. The company wants to bridge the gap between the query and the goal.

Yandex calls the interactive snippets Islands. The tool keeps searchers on the engine. Chunks of data and information appear on the search page similar to Google's sitelinks, but do not require searchers to click through. Ilya Segalovich, Yandex CTO, called Sitelinks an "outdated way of providing information."

The feature allows webmasters to input transactional forms in search results, show information in real-time, and modify the look in query returns. The tool will become available for all types of devices, launching first for personal computers and tablets, followed by smartphones and other mobile devices. It is being rolled out to the company's 8 million users in Turkey first, and then Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in the coming months.

The Web site owner, not Yandex, still determines the information that will serve up personal results. Last month, the search engine launched personalized search, the results taking into consideration a user’s long- and short-term interests. Search queries now influence search results within seconds, enabling the engine to determine whether a person wants information about a book or a film before they have finished typing the topic in the search box.

The platform takes into consideration language preferences and permanent interests. Now we have learned how to determine current search intents of our users from their search footprint to serve up relevant information.