Posts on State of Search about ‘Yandex’

Google to Replace Yandex in Russian Firefox

Google-Yandex-Firefox

Russia is one of the few places where Google isn’t the most dominant force when it comes to search engines. There Google ‘only’ has 26,5%, where local search engine Yandex takes about 60 percent of the search market.

Google however might be winning a small part of this market share with a change which has been made right away: Firefox is replacing Yandex with Google as their default search engine in their Russian version of the browser.

The change is a bit surprising since it is changed starting June 1st, where the commercial agreement between Mozilla and Yandex doesn’t end before December 2012. Even though the browser setting is not part of the agreement, it seems like a drastic move but is probably part of the global agreement Google and Firefox made recently.

Market share?

So does this mean Yandex will be losing a lot of market share to Google in Russia? Well no, it won’t go that fast. Yandex itself thinks the losses will be very minor, both the revenue losses as well as the market share.

A Yandex spokesman told The Next Web:

“Default search in a browser is not the only or the key factor that defines a share in the search market. As before, we will keep making our services better, improving their functionality, design, efficiency and comprehensiveness – as it is our firm belief that no matter what service the browser is equipped with, it will be used only if it satisfies users’ demands.

Yandex’s search share in Google Chrome that has more complicated settings for changing the default search than Firefox, is bigger that Google’s, which is the default search engine in this browser.

A default search engine, however, does matter for beginner internet users or for those who still are not sure what search engine they prefer. That is why we will keep offering to visitors on our websites an option to choose Yandex as a default search engine in their browser – this is an easy way to use Yandex without typing the address for those who have been using it anyway.”

On top of that Yandex announced it will continue to offer the Russians a customized version of Firefox, which has Yandex as the default search engine.

Yandex.Maps for Turkey

Meanwhile Yandex keeps expanding outside of Russia, going towards the South of Europe and Asia. After launching their search engine in Turkey last year they are not yet gaining much market share there and have now launched Yandex.Maps for Turkey. Maps usually gets Yandex ‘on the map’ in countries and helps increase the market shares. Yandex CTO, Ilya Segalovich even said he was aiming for 20 to 30 percent market share in Turkey.

See below an interview of the Wall Street Journal with Segalovich

Yandex and Twitter to Partner Up: Yandex Search Your World

twitter-Yandex

Where Google has lost the connection to Twitter’s famous ‘fire hose’, a competitor of Google in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, Yandex, now has made a deal to get that fire hose.

With that deal Yandex immediately made the move towards what Google is doing and introduced a new social search service similar to Google’s ‘Search, plus your world‘ .

The big difference between Google and Yandex’ social search is that where Google is very focussed on Google+, Yandex gets data from different social networks and has as said all of the Twitter results. (more…)

Looking for a Taxi in Moscow? Try Yandex

taxi-moscow

I don’t know how many of you have actually been to Moscow before or will go in the near future, but apparently getting a taxi in the Russian capital is a big problem. Waiting takes a long time, at least half an hour.

But there is a solution coming for that issue from a surprising corner: the search engine Yandex. Yandex launched Yandex.Taxi, intended to find taxi’s quickly and reduce the waiting time.

Yandex has made a deal with several Taxi service providers and will be looking at their cars and availability. Yandex.Taxi will then send a booking request to the car nearest to the client. Once confirmed “the client can track their taxi right on the city map.”. (more…)

Yandex rolls out Infinite Scrolling

yandex-scrolling-more

We know Google has been testing infinite scrolling for a while, and we expect Google to come out with some sort of infinite scrolling functionality soon. But the Americans in this case have been beaten by the Russians.

Yandex just announced that they are rolling out infinite scrolling on their search result pages. If you click on the “10 more results” button (either in Russian or the English version) you will get 10 more results below the ten you just saw, keeping the first ten in place and the search box on top. (more…)

Social search comes to Yandex: buys online newspaper generator The Tweeted Times

Yandex Logo

Russian search engine Yandex is slowly taking steps towards a bigger reach, inside and especially outside of Russia. After going public in May and changes to their search tools this is the first time Yandex moves towards social: they bought online newspaper generator The Tweeted Times.

The Tweeted Times is, like paper.li, a service which generates a ‘newspaper’ of items which were shared by your social connections, in this case people you follow on Twitter. The move seems strange but has everything to do with getting social search into Yandex. (more…)

Yandex rolls out personalized search based on language

yandex-logo-new

On State of Search we’ve reported earlier about Yandex as being one of the possible threats to Google’s current worldwide domination. Today Yandex has made a major step towards internationalization of the search engine with rolling out the new search platform ‘Reykjavík’.

Reykyavík is built to deliver search results based on the user’s language preferences. This means it will display more English results for users who often visit English web resources. The company calls this the ‘first step towards personalized search’, I call it the first step towards internationalization. (more…)

Manage your site in Yandex with Yandex.Webmaster

Yandex.Webmaster

We already had Google Webmaster Central and Bing Webmaster Tools to manage our sites when it comes to these different search engine. With the growing market share of Yandex in the East of Europe it can also be interesting to look in that direction. But not everyone’s Russian will be as good. Luckily Yandex now launched an English-language Webmaster Tools for Yandex.

The service can be reached at http://webmaster.yandex.com/. The Yandex Webmaster service will provide you with information about your site in relation to Yandex. (more…)

Andy Atkins Kruger: “everything that’s written about Yandex from an SEO perspective is wrong”

Andy Atkins Kruger knows all about international search. And so he knows all about Yandex. The Russian Search Engine is growing rapidly and is doing some pretty interesting things there. At SMX Advanced Rand Fishkin made a special ‘Whiteboard Friday’ with Andy talking about Yandex. And Andy decided to give us some very valuable insights into Yandex.

Wistia


(more…)

Yandex goes public at $25.00 per share

nasdaq-yandex

Google doesn’t take them seriously, but many in the East of Europe and the countries below Russia certainly do. And for a reason, they are growing rapidly and making new functionalities and taking new steps all the time. Who? Well Yandex off course.

Yandex earlier announced it was going public and today announced the pricing of its initial public offering. 52,174,088 Class A ordinary shares will be available for $25.00 per share. The Class A ordinary shares will begin trading today on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “YNDX”. (more…)

Yet Another Index? Making an Impact in Russa – International Search Summit 2011 #SMXISS

Next up is Preston Carey, Business Development Director at Yandex, giving us an insight into the Russian search engine. Firstly an introduction and some context around the Russian market.

Markets in the developed countries are not really growing very much anymore, the two places that are booming are Russia and Asia. Russia is the seventh largest market in terms on internet users, sitting just behind Germany. Russia only has 43% internet penetration at the moment but it is growing hugely year-on-year so could easily be taking over Germany within the next 18 months. (more…)

Yandex integrates WebVisor in their analytics tool

webvisor-technology

With Google in the middle of working on changes in their strategy and Bing taking advantage by winning some market share in the US as well as in the UK it might be worth looking a bit to the east. There Yandex is slowly becoming a force which in the near future might be one we should take into account.

Yandex has been building on both their market share and their features steadily in the past year. And it is starting to show. They not only fired several features out there, they also launched their english version of Yandex.ru, Yandex.com. This version is pretty good to work with actually and might just be an interesting competitor to Google and Bing.

And Yandex is expanding in different ways. They have now announced it has implemented WebVisor, an analytics tool for tracking user behaviour on a website, which they bought late last year. (more…)

Yandex Launches Online Translation Service for Russian and Ukrainian

yandex-translate

We all have something to say about Google Translate. Usually we complain that it’s not good enough. Or we like it, because it does help us get started. What we do know is that we shouldn’t use it to actually translate a website.

One of the languages which Google has issues with is Russian. That is one of the reasons why Yandex is bigger and better in Russia. Now Yandex is making use of that extra knowledge by launching a Google Translate competitor for the languages Google is struggling with: Russian and Ukrainian. (more…)

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