Google’s not top dog in Russia, Yandex still dominates local search
There’s only four countries in the world where Google doesn’t dominate the local search market, and Russia happens to be one of them. To be more specific, Google only handles around 21% of total searches while the top honors go to eight year-old Yandex who holds 55% of the total market, or roughly 8 million searches per day.
While some might say this has nothing to do with Google’s global dominance, it’s important to note that Russia is expected to become Europe’s largest internet-user market in the next five years- with an estimated 60 million users by 2013, according to the UK’s Times Online. With numbers like that, Google almost can’t afford to ignore it. Already, 33 million Russians use the internet daily- as many people as in Britain and already more than in France. Albeit to say, Yandex has seen rapid growth in its short existence, thanks to the recent influx in internet users as a whole. Yandex just seemed to be in the right place, at the right time compared to Google who moved into Russia relatively late in the game.
It’s because of this rapid growth, the company is already valued at nearly £2.5 billion, and plans to launch an IPO later in the year. “These are very exciting times,” said co-founder and CEO Arkady Volozh as he prepared to move the company, which employs 1,200 people, to a vast new office in central Moscow. “Russia has the potential to become the largest internet-user market in Europe. It’s a huge market with fantastic growth. Every day more and more people in Russia are discovering the internet.
Google opened up an office in Russia only two years ago, and since then Yandex hasn’t lost a single employee to Google- a fact which contradicts the situation in most areas Google moves into. Yandex is said to be the “Google” of Russia in that it boasts one of the best work environments in the country. Still, Yandex, the world’s second most popular non-English search engine after China’s Baidu, is set to open an office in Silicon Valley, headed by one of Yahoo’s former senior vice-presidents. I guess they still want to learn how the US does things, as well as tap into the local talent found in and around Silicon Valley.
I guess only time will tell if Yandex can keep the top spot. I wonder if they offer the type of secondary products Google offers such as collaboration tools and hosted applications. I’m sure with a move into Silicon Valley, they’ll pick up on what works with Google and apply it back home, but Google is still a global brand, while Yandex is still local.
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August 25th, 2008
Actually Yandex is quite powerful in a whole range of services that the market here in Russia is ready for, including blog search, email, photo hosting, business social networking and lots more. So I believe that those service that they don’t offer are most certainly those that they don’t think the market already needs.
November 25th, 2010
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January 14th, 2011
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