Yandex Vega

What changed

Vega introduced neural network pre-ranking of documents, a large expert assessor programme for evaluating specialist content, and infrastructure changes that reduced the time between crawl and availability in results. Yandex presented it as its most significant ranking change of the decade for the Russian-language web. Only the month of announcement is documented here.

Timing

Rollout began 1 December 2019. No completion date was announced. Rankings typically remain unstable for the whole rollout window, so measurements taken inside it are not a reliable read on the outcome.

What it affected