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.

Hi Anton - welcome to the forum

Yes I see Yandex as having some key stengths over here that have kept Google at bay however they have made some ground recently, overtaking Rambler for second position. I remember them saying at the recent Internet & Business Conference (c-ib.ru) that they didn't need to advertise here in Russia (they would rely on word of mouth etc.). It was met with some skeptism by the audience but they have slowly increased market share over the last year.

Like you I also notice a high quality in Yandex Direct at the moment (conversions). Personally I think that has more to do with their selective approach to adding sites to the network rather than the mechanics of the system. It must be a tough decision for them whether to let the masses (blogs/forums) in on that. On the one hand they don't want the webmaster base to align themselves with Google through Adsense but on the other, they could easily loose the quality advantage.

Still Russia is a great market to be involved in and I do respect the knowledge of all the Yandex guys I've met (and of of course Arkady Volozh, who is amazingly down-to-earth and friendly). As long as they keep up this growth and speed of development, I definitely think they have what it takes to hold top position here. I can also see them taking the fight into other markets as well, Ukraine you mention but there are plenty of other opportunities out there.

Nick, it's an obvious question - but which other markets do you see Yandex targeting? If they went for the Slavic language that would put them in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia, Croatia, Bulgaria and the Stans?

So where do you predict next?

Andy

Well Ukraine is the big one for Yandex at the moment - 3m users there makes it an attractive target (around 43% Russian speakers). After that, well I've heard some rumours that Estonia, Latvia and Belarus are interesting for them. As you say, Bulgaria is on the list too but there is such strong Google domination there atm (90%).

They definitely aren't staying still in Russia and will be fighting every step of the way with Google in these markets.

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E3internet: Russian Online Marketing

RussianMarketer.com | RussianMarketer.ru

Personal Blog: 300km North of Moscow. Skype nick_wilsdon

Now it is very hard to work with Yandex, because he changes the algorithms of ranging, improves and adds new servesy and works unstably from it, the amount of users diminishes every day, and Google increases. Why does Yandex change algorithms? Because, in his delivery there are catalogues of sites on the first places!Yandex wants to clean them from the first places, for achievement of this purpose he even began banit' them, now in ban approximately 50% catalogues!

About expansion of Yandex in Estonia, Bulgaria, Latvia and Belarus hear first time.

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I cant agree with you. Its very simple: Yandex has the major share of search traffiс - everybody wants to be in its SERP, Google has only 10% - interes in it is not so big.

When Google extend its share - will see how Google will fight against rus se spam.

What about the speed of indexation? Yandex has special clawler named bystrorobot (speedy robot). This robot indexing popular sites and pages with incoming links very fast and accurate.

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blog.seotext.ru

Hi,
honestly, it does't matter that Yandex changes algo often and unexpectedly for us (despite one of the last changes was clearly announced on searchengines forum). For many years people used to search with Yandex.
And they will keep doing this 'cause of habit and expansion of yandex into whole Runet.

For example Google finds first heading from Правда.Ру (Грузинским властям показалось, что их атакуют с неба), while Yandex doesn't.

Yes it is, because Pravda.ru is a news site, so you should try this one - http://news.yandex.ru/

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blog.seotext.ru

If it's a news site then there must be some high priority on indexation for news.yandex, isn't it?

I've searched for recent posts from SearchEngines.RU in Yandex and Google, it appears that most of them are either in both or in none, still there are some that are in Google only - "Идея реализации на двух языках показалась интересной. Как в этом случае поступать с SEO. И как поисковики относятся к таким страницам?" (random post).

So even that doesn't make much difference for users, but it shows that apparently Google indexates slightly faster.