New Social Feature on Yandex Maps App

A popular mapping application has introduced a new feature enabling users to subscribe to reviews from friends and city experts, enhancing personalized recommendations and user engagement.

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

A popular mapping application has introduced a new feature enabling users to subscribe to reviews from friends and city experts, enhancing personalized recommendations and user engagement.

In a significant update aimed at enhancing user engagement and providing personalized experiences, a widely-used mapping application has rolled out a new feature that allows users to subscribe to reviews from their friends and city experts. This update introduces a more social aspect to the app, merging navigation with trusted recommendations.

The feature, housed in a newly designed “Feed” section within user profiles, enables app users to stay updated on the latest reviews from people within their network or those recognized as city experts. For instance, coffee aficionados can now follow users who frequently review coffee shops, receiving updates directly in their feeds. This not only makes finding highly recommended spots easier but also adds a personal touch to the app’s functionality.

Further integrating the social component, the application now offers the option to connect to users’ contact lists. By granting access, the app can suggest following reviews from friends and acquaintances, thereby weaving a user’s personal connections into their mapping experience. When searching for places within the app, users will see ratings and reviews prominently displayed from their friends and selected experts, with reviews from friends appearing first on organization cards.

Users have the option to subscribe to individuals with open profiles. However, reviews from private profiles will remain visible on individual place cards but will not be shared in the feeds or on the profiles of others, respecting the privacy settings of all users.

This new feature marks another step in the application’s evolution, following its recent launch of a service called “Neuro,” which integrates advanced search capabilities with large generative models to enhance user interactions and provide sophisticated search functionalities.

With this update, the mapping application continues to adapt and innovate, offering features that not only assist in navigation but also foster a community-oriented environment where personal recommendations and trusted advice lead the way in urban exploration.

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor