One of the biggest generators of traffic to Russian news articles is changing how it works

Russia's most popular Internet search engine, Yandex, has updated its News service to personalize results for every user. According to the company, Yandex.News will automatically use anonymized user data to favor links to media outlets users visit more often. Manually altering these customizations is not possible, Yandex says.

According to Forbes, Yandex's news service is the primary source of traffic for a wide array of news outlets in Russia. Automating customizations threatens to reduce traffic for new media outlets, analysts say, making it harder for unestablished publications to gain new readers' attention. The changes could also affect fairly prominent media outlets. RBC's chief editor, Roman Badanin, told Forbes that he has already noticed a decline in traffic from Yandex.Novosti (though he said the downturn might also be seasonal).

Vedomosti chief editor Tatiana Lysova warns that "excessive personalization" could lead to an "information bubble," where readers only find what conforms to their existing preferences and beliefs.

Bloomberg's Leonid Bershidsky criticizes Yandex's decision to make its news personalization automated, saying any customizations should be at the individual user's discretion and in their control.