In a fascinating ‘fireside chat’ type interview, Ilya Segalovich was interviewed about Yandex’ development.
In a frank exchange, Segalovich revealed that the name was originally an abbreviation for ‘Yet another Index’, and the motivation for building it was that there was no alternative – in the early 19990s the Internet didn’t exist in the state it is now, and the developers didn’t see huge market for it. Their first product was used by 100 people – Segalovich was both engineer and customer support.
There was no shopping index in Russia – the founders tried to make “something beautiful” to help.
I know, I know – over the last week there has been a steady flow of 2012 reviews and 2013 predictions , but as I’ve already spoken about in an earlier post, looking at the behaviour, developments and decisions made by the global search engines can give us useful insights into what they are focusing on, and therefore where we can (and should) focus our own international search efforts. After all, search engines significantly more data on global user behaviour than the rest of us.
So that I’m not writing this until 2014, I’ve only picked a couple of areas and I’m specifically looking at Google, Baidu and Yandex (*other search engines are available). (more…)
On 1st October, Russian search engine Yandex announced the launch of its new web browser, Yandex.browser. Based on the Chromium open source technology (used to build Google’s Chrome among others), the cloud-based browser is very similar in look and feel to what we’ve seen before but incorporates many of Yandex’s already popular products and services, and of course its own search engine.
The decision to launch a browser has undoubtedly been driven by search, and the potential advantage Google was gaining over Yandex in the Russian search space as a result of Chrome. StatCounter data shows Chrome as the most popular browser in the country, with approximately 33% share and with Google as its default search engine, it’s no surprise that Google has begun, slowly, to eat away at Yandex’s majority hold on the market. And the search giant is serious about succeeding in Russia, one of the few markets where it trails a local competitor, having even run an offline marketing campaign there to promote Chrome but it is a still long way off beating Yandex, which stills holds roughly 60% share. (more…)
Search engines guide what search marketers do – their rules, guidelines and incessant updates all play a role in shaping strategies and recommendations – and often result in a lot of headaches and expletives. But how often do you look at what strategies and tactics the search engines are using to grow their own business? After all, search engines are businesses- international businesses – that want to increase their customer base and make a profit (and we know they certainly do that).
Rather than just reacting to updates and additions to tweak campaigns and websites, monitoring what the search engines are doing and where they’re going can provide useful insights into what is going to be important and effective in global marketing.
Over the next couple of posts, I’ll take a closer look at what Google, Yandex and Baidu are focusing on and how that can help us with our own global efforts. Today, I’m specifically looking at their choices and strategy when it comes to international expansion. (more…)
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.
“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
According to the Guardian Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex, has said Google is “abusing its dominance to shut out competitors in cyberspace”. Segalovich places his remarks in response to comments made by Sergey Brin almost two weeks ago in the same Guardian where he said web freedom is facing big threats.
Interestingly enough Brin apologized for the words he used in that specific interview only a few days after the interview on his Google+ page.
The Yandex’ founders remark is another sign that Google has some hurdles to take in Europe when it comes to the image of their dominance.
The remarks are largely aimed at Android, which has been under fire for the past few days with an Oracle patent case going against them. According to Segalovich Android is a “strange combination of openness and not openness” (more…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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