It is well known that Yandex is extremely active in trying to give the search engine a “human face”. Google has a voice through Search Liaison, Developer Advocates and Webmaster Trends Analysts (Mueller, Illyes, Splitt, et al). Whereas Yandex is taking the route of humanizing the engine.
Part of this Yandex policy of “humanizing” the World Wide Web was the assignment of a technical support service, which included several dozen employees all adopting the pen name of Plato Schukin. the human name Plato.
Using the below signature, the technical support team respond to users questions, queries, and sometimes pleas for help following algorithm updates.
Regards, Plato Schukin
Who Is Plato Schukin?
There is no definitive or public list of names, however, Plato’s responses are mainly penned by Yandex technical support staff.
It is thought that the number of users who use the service to ask for further information, or write technical support requests, is extremely small, however, this does not mean that Plato answers all queries.
If a webmaster has a really difficult or heavily bespoke issue, or just makes a suggestion to improve Yandex, then Plato quickly and politely answers something along the lines of:
Your signal has been noted. Sincerely, Plato Schukin
Plato conducts the lion’s share of business correspondence precisely with the creators of sites – with webmasters and, indirectly, with optimizers.
User requests to Plato are very different. Basically, they relate to clarifying the causes of crashes when indexing a site, excluding a resource from the index and other similar issues. Considering that optimizers spend significant budgets on search engine promotion, these problems are very relevant for website owners and require a quick response.