Is Yandex an Emerging Force?

March 16, 2012

Having fought for market share in its homeland since the mid-1990s, Yandex just achieved a victory: over the past three months, the Russian search engine captured an average of 59.4% of that nation’s Internet searches, while Google trailed with 25.6%. Search Engine Watch examines the contest in “Yandex Tries to Solidify Search dominance, Keep Google Down in Russia.”

Local knowledge helps Yandex outrun Google in the Russian market. The site is also advancing its Social Networking Search, which incorporates social content into search results. (Where have we heard that before?) Yandex has also partnered with Twitter and will soon display (public) tweets in its results pages.

Writer Michael Bonfils asserts:

There is no doubt Yandex will face many challenges ahead in the face of browser wars, mobile operating systems and even new competition beyond Google. As a representative of several advertisers in the Russian market, we have only seen continued query volume, search quality improvement, better conversions and advertiser return on investment. When it comes to Google vs Yandex in Russia, I still think Yandex in 2012 will continue to dominate and be an impactful and useful search engine product to millions of Russian speakers around the world and many multinational companies who market to the Russian audience.

Yandex has a piece of semantic search system, Blekko.com. Should Google look to the East or should it look toward Facebook?

Cynthia Murrell, March 16, 2012

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.