Russia is one of few countries where Google didn’t become one of most popular search engines. And the reason for that is not government ban, like in China, or some other restrictions by government or anyone else, the reason for that is called Yandex.

No one can argue about Yandex being a leading search engine in Ru-net (Russian Internet). Today Yandex produces more than half of all search engines traffic leaving Google with about 10%. It is one of the fastest developing services in Ru-net. Couple years ago it launched context advertise service similar to Google Ads, and this service appears to be much more effective with Russian web-sites, as seen from forums, like SearchEngines.ru, people prefer to put Yandex Direct rather then Google Ads on their web sites. The reason is Yandex can find more relative advertisements, and that means more profits for web site owner, and “poor” Google can sometimes even put an ad in English on site with Russian content. Yandex has online shop, online map, free e-mail services and many more features that modern portals have today, it even have it's own Internet money (like WMZ). The fact is its profits doubled last year making 72m$ in 2006.

Still, the other fact is that Yandex search algorithms are not as sophisticated as Googles, its spam filters aren't as good and "black hat" optimisation often works here better. Its page indexation is not as fast and accurate as Googles, and it doesn't have that much pages in its database.

So what then attracts such a huge auditory in Russia to Yandex making it most powerful site in Russia? It might be its recent advertising campaign on TV with slogan: "Yandex - everything could be found" or may be it's the way Yandex presents itself in very "Russian" way, like its choice to put Russian letter "ya"(Я) in it's name when most other Russian web sites try to avoid “only Russian” letters in their domain names as it is can cause misspellings. Other thing about the web site is its appearance – the site looks rather easy made, not like a monster of search industry with multi-million dollar profits. Well, there is a reason for that simply-beauty; design of Yadex pages was made by the best possible web-design studio in Russia - ArtLebedev.ru. So, Yandex itself and its image made by clever PR made it look very friendly and easy to use. Its users might even feel patriotic preferring it to Google. To prove it we can compare Russia with Ukrain, where more than 40% Internet users prefer Google when more than half population speaks Russian and uses it for browsing. So it’s not all about language!

There are as well some advantages of Yandex comparing to Google, like Yandex has no problems with indexation of dynamic pages or pages with frames. And it works better with Russian syntaxes. And it has very nice options for regional search.

But altogether Yandex is of course not better than Google if we are talking just about searching information, though it's much more adopted to Russia and to Russians, and that is its main advantage that will hold it on the top of Russian Internet.