Well it’s been several hours now since Yandex launched their new global index; Yandex.com. The reaction, judging by Twitter, seems overwhelmingly positive.

Having had time to explore, here are some of my observations on the new service.

Interesting Launch Strategy

As has been pointed out on both the English and Russian side, this was a strange launch. Perhaps this was due to their insistence that the new index was meant for Russian users. It was inevitable that that many would see this launch as a shot across the bow of the western search engines. Even the Russian press has referred to this as a competitive blow to Google.

It maybe the smart move though. Many welcome greater competition among search engines, especially with Google and over-hyping the alpha version at this point may encourage unfair comparisons and disappointment.

Surprisingly though, Yandex seems to have sailed through initial inspections. People like the clean interface and the spam-free results.

Clean Results

As Duncan Morris points out over at Distilled, the Yandex SERPs are great.

After a very brief play I’m incredibly impressed at the relative lack of spam and the quality of the results that are being returned. Not to mention the fact that there aren’t any ads.

…I’ve not had a chance to dig very deep but a first glance at the results would seem to suggest they are either taking a more aggressive approach to finding and banning paid links that Google is or they are better at removing spam from their index

Well first, there is no way Yandex would go forward ad-free. Their contextual advertising system Yandex Direct is well developed. They fully understand the importance of PPC in their business model.

There is an obvious reason Yandex.com is not running advertising. Yandex Direct works in Russian, both the interface and the PPC adverts. They are not in a position to place non-Russian language adverts on Yandex.com yet.

The second issue Duncan raised also caught my attention. Paid links are endemic within Russian online marketing. I was skeptical that Yandex could have taken such a huge step. However, on reflection, there could be some truth in this…

New Index, New Rules

This is not the first time we have seen English language results at Yandex. In 2008, they started selecting popular or authoritative English, French or German sites for inclusion in their index. If you go to Yandex.ru and search in English, you will see English language results.

However at the top of the Russian SERPs, you now have three links.

Users can choose to switch between all results, Russian results and now global or world results. Of course the global or world results are the ones shown at Yandex.com. English searches between the two give very different results. Take for example the search for “Compare credit cards” all results vs. global results.

It is also clear that Yandex has just dramatically increased their index of non-Russian sites. I’m seeing small sites with no links appearing in the new index. They have even managed to index the new sub-domain for my daughter, launched a couple of weeks ago. There is obviously more going on now than simply filtering by popularity or authority – my apologies to you Duncan.

Could they have implemented some new filters, specifically for the global index? Why not. They would have more scope to do this with “whitehat” western brand-sites without fear of loosing relevancy. Yandex.com could actually be their testing ground for new, stronger spam filters.

Like Duncan, I’m making Yandex.com my default search. These are interesting times for a competitive search engine market, even John Andrews must be getting a little excited. We may have a new casino in town.

Today, Yandex launched their long-awaited global search engine, Yandex.com. They have now moved from being a Russian-only service to a global search player, competing in several country-markets.

As they state in the press release, this has been a long journey. I’ve been talking about this since 2008, when Yandex mentioned their plans at the CIB.ru conference.

The key issue is that Russians use Yandex for Russian searches but Google for international or English language searches. As a stop-gap measure Yandex placed links to other engines on the bottom of their pages, clearly more was needed to retain this traffic.

Yandex started building an index in languages other than Russian, first English German, French and Ukrainian. This has been widened now to 17 languages – Belorussian, Kazakh, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Bulgarian, Tatar, Czech, Polish, Romanian and Catalan.

Yandex are keen to stress this new service is testing new algorithms for global search and not pitched at one particular audience, i.e. Europe or America. They admit that there will always be competition between search engines where they operate. For today [my emphasis] these are Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

It’s hard not to see this as a threat to other search engines. ComScore rated Yandex the fastest growing search engine this year. In July 2009 they were recorded as having 1.2 billion searches. Tiny compared to Google with 76 billion, but greater than AOL (1 billion), Facebook (879m) and equal to Ask (1.2 billion).

Comparing them to other “Google-killers” such as the infamous Cuil.com, it’s hard not to get excited about their chances. This isn’t a start-up but an established company with a substantial technological and financial base to work from. In the Russian market they have not only fought off Google but increased market share over the last 3 years.

The information on Yandex.com and their choice of English logo does little to dispel rumours of ambitions beyond Russia and its neighbouring countries.

Our major goal is to provide answers to any questions our users may have. Yandex.com is the answer for anyone searching for relevant information in one of the European languages.

This is clearly a shot over the bow of Google. And yes, they should be worried.

Update: Exploring the New Yandex Index

[К русской версии]

The next meeting for the Russian Tech Delegation (RusTechDel) is taking place in the meeting area next to the Yandex offices (16 Ulitsa Leva Tolstogo) on the Monday 24th May, from 4-7 pm. We thank Yandex, Arkady Volozh (Yandex CEO) and Esther Dyson (EDventure.com) for their support.

The aim of the RusTechDel events, is to encourage cooperation amongst the IT community and social groups in Moscow.

Following on from the last meeting we have decided it would be better to showcase NGO groups and give them an opportunity to explain their project and requirements to the group. If you would like to make a short presentation (10mins+10 minutes of questions) then please let me know using the form below.

We are resticted to 70 places, so fill out the form below to added to the event guest list or join the RusTechDel Meetup.com group.

Следующая встреча RusTechDel состоится в понедельник 24 мая с 16:00 до 19:00 у входа в офис Яндекса (бизнес центр RedRose, ул. Льва Толстого, 16). Мы благодарим Яндекс, Аркадия Воложа (генерального директора Яндекса) и Эстер Дайсон (EDventure.com) за их поддержку.

Встречи RusTechDel служат укреплению сотрудничества между IT сферой и социальными объединениями в Москве.

По результатам прошлой встречи мы решили, что стоит дать слово не государственным организациям и предоставить им возможность рассказать о своих проектах. Если вы хотите сделать короткую презентацию (10 минут + 10 минут вопросов), пожалуйста, сообщите мне об этом.

[К русской версии]

The first follow up meeting for the Russian Tech Delegation (RusTechDel) is taking place at the Yandex offices at 16 Ulitsa Leva Tolstogo on the Sunday 18th April, from 3-6 pm. We thank Yandex, Arkady Volozh (Yandex CEO) and Esther Dyson (EDventure.com) for their support.

The aim of the meeting is to encourage cooperation among Moscow IT sector and social organisations. There is no formal program but it will start with introductions from attendees, including statements of what they can do and what they are looking from from partners.

We would also like to have one or two companies demonstrate new products or start-up ideas. Please volunteer in the form below with a brief summary if you would like to present to the group.

The goal here is not to produce some common project or statement, but to foster a variety of separate activities. If we do that successfully, people will come back to the next meetings, and if not – then it will have been an interesting experiment.

“Silicon Valley is more than a place, its a state of mind”.

Fill out the form below if you would like to attend and your name will be added to the event guest list.

Первая встреча с Русской Технической Делегацией (RusTechDel) состоится в офисе Яндекса на ул. Льва Толстого 16, в это воскресенье 18 апреля, с 15:00 до 18:00. Мы благодарим Яндекс, Аркадия Воложа (генерального директора Яндекса) и Эстер Дайсон (EDventure.com) за их поддержку.

Целью встречи является поощрение взаимовыгодного сотрудничества между Московским IT сектором и социальными организациями. У нас нет формальной программы, но мы начнем с того, что каждый представится, рассказав, что он умеет делать и чего ожидает от партнёров.

Мы также хотели бы, чтобы одна или две компании представили свои новые продукты или идеи старт-апов. Пожалуйста, если у вас есть какая-то новинка, которую вы бы хотели представить группе, запишитесь в форме на сайте.

Целью встречи будет не реализация какого-нибудь общего проекта или создание манифеста, но поощрение множества отдельных видов деятельности. Если у нас получится, люди снова придут на следующую встречу. Если нет – значит, это останется просто интересным опытом.

“Силиконовая долина – это больше, чем просто место, это состояние ума”.

Заполните форму на сайте, если вы собираетесь приехать, и ваше имя будет добавлено в списки гостей.

The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest stretch of railway in the world. The epic 9226 km journey covers 1/3rd of the planet, 7 time zones, 2 continents, 12 regions and 87 cities.

Now Google, in partnership with the Russian Railways has brought this journey to your desktop. By clicking on the map you can view any section of the route on video – shot from the window of the train as it moves through the Russian countryside.

You can jump ahead to key beauty-spots on the map, such as Lake Baikal, the Barabinskaya steppe and the immense Zeisko-Bureinskaya plain. See dawn break over the Zeya river. At key points on the journey you can tour towns, with the presenter Yelena Abitayeva. Also scattered along the route are spectacular pictures of Russian landscapes from the photographer Anton Lange.

There is over 150 hours of footage in the project so you probably don’t want to watch it all in the one sitting. For entertainment the project provides an audio-book of the appropriately epic “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy but unfortunately this is only in Russian. The balalaika music on offer needs no translation but the radio option is more likely soundtrack to the journey.

“This project was very special for us”, Konstantine Kuzmin, Marketing Director for Google Russia was quoted in The Moscow Times. “We want to demonstrate how unusual and fascinating Russia really is and how much is can offer to a devoted tourist. We hope this project will become the starting point not only for virtual but also for real trips across Russia.”

View the project in English

Technorati Tags: Google, railways, Russia, trans-siberian

The U.S. State Department organised a delegation of IT luminaries to visit Russia and discuss the state of the web industry. Aside from U.S. officials the group included executives from U.S. tech firms such as Twitter, Ebay and Cisco Systems. Ashton Kutcher, a regular Twitter user with over 4.5m followers bought some star quality to the delegation. As Conor Sweeney of Reuters pointed out:

The delegation is meeting Kremlin officials, universities and private businesses to see how Russia and the United States can work together on technology issues, one of the projects set up by the two countries as they seek to improve relations.

As you might expect the event has been covered well on Twitter, under the hashtag #RusTechTel. Ashton livestreamed the event on Sunday Night at the offices of Yandex, files maybe found here. (time dependent). Finally you can find some pictures from Esther Dyson here.

Largely the conference has been covering the basics and informing the delegation about the current state of Internet development in Russia.

An interesting question but the learning experience may possibly be two-way. Lack of investment and Russia’s particular form of short-term capitalism may force sites in Runet to develop paid models sooner than their American peers. It’s a good conversation to have though, and long overdue.

This figure was supported by the ComScore study, which shows Yandex has 91% growth and has now become the 8th largest search engine globally.

Social usage in Russia at 6hrs/month compares well with social network usage in the U.S. A recent Neilsen study put this at 7hrs per month for FaceBook. This explains why social networks in the West are so keen to impact the Russian market. So far the leading social networks of VKontakte and Odnoklassniki and have around 90m users between them.

Technorati Tags: RusTechDel

Yandex has a unique approach to image search on their search engine. Rather than simply listing images they find on the internet, they link these together in groups.

As you see here with the image of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (view search) To the right of the image Yandex lists all the page locations where they have found the image to be published. They also show the image dimensions of the copies.

This functionality gives Yandex image search an advantage over Google. You are able to find several articles that link to the same image. It makes finding information through connected images quicker and more efficient.

In terms of optimisation, Yandex’s image bot (Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; P) can identify the same image, even if the filename has been changed.

Placing several links on the same image encourages cross-traffic, so there is a good case for finding popular or current images and using them on your blog posts to build image search traffic. Mind the copyright on the image though, this function means that royalty owners can quickly see who has published copies.

Technorati Tags: Image search

July 27 (Bloomberg) — AOL, the Internet unit being spun off from Time Warner Inc., may be worth less than $5.66 billion, based on the price Google Inc. received for its 5 percent stake in the company.

Time Warner, based in New York, said in a regulatory filing today it repurchased the stake on July 8 for $283 million, a price that includes cash distributions owed to Google.

AOL, an online pioneer, is worth a fraction of the $20 billion implied when Google paid $1 billion for the stake in 2005. Time Warner said in May it plans to spin off AOL into a separate, publicly traded company this year. The Web service has been hit by competition and falling advertising sales.

Google’s holding fetched less than the $330 million David Joyce, a New York-based analyst with Miller Tabak & Co., estimated on July 20. The Mountain View, California-based company, owner of the biggest search engine, wrote down $726 million of its AOL investment last year.
As part of the 2005 deal, Google agreed to provide Web- search service to AOL and share in the ad revenue the inquiries generated. AOL has agreed to use Google’s search services and sponsored links through at least December 2010, according to the filing.

Ed Adler, a spokesman for Time Warner, declined to comment on AOL’s value. Jane Penner, a spokeswoman for Google, declined to comment beyond the filing.

Time Warner rose 2 cents to $27.60 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Google fell $1.92 to $444.80 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, giving the company a market value of $140.5 billion.

Armstrong’s Plans

AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong told employees last week that job cuts are possible as he undertakes a 60-day review of the Internet company’s cost structure. Armstrong, a former Google executive named AOL CEO in March, also plans to overhaul advertising and develop more local Web sites to help revive falling sales.

source

Yahoo company presented a new portal officially. There are some changes in the block of private information on the personal page of user. The option My Favorites was added as a separate column where user can add more than 60 web-applications.
After adding selected applications to the list (including social networks, Facebook) content on the page of this application is added to the user’s personalized page.

In addition, user can set up block Yahoo My Favorites in iGoogle style. Similarity with iGoogle is conditional: the application is implemented as a pop-up windows that appear on the right side of the screen when a user rolls over it. The portal is implemented in white-violet design. Although the leader of company Carol Bartz said repeatedly that she does not like violet color, by developers opinion, it will become the visit card of Yahoo.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo

At Search Marketing Expo – SMX Advanced in Seattle last month, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s anti-spam team, said that nofollow-based “PageRank sculpting” was less effective than in the past. SEOs were left wondering how the change would affect their optimization efforts. As a panelist during the second day of the search engine marketing conference, Bruce Clay wanted to gauge the scope of the issue. “How many people in the audience are using nofollow?” he asked. The show of hands was practically unanimous.

Update: Shortly after the publication of this article, Matt Cutts published a post on his blog further explaining Google’s recommendations for using the nofollow attribute. We have updated this article to include Matt’s most recent indications of how nofollow affects PageRank. While the recordings in the article accurately document what Matt said at SMX Advanced, additional details are addressed in Matt’s blog post, PageRank sculpting. Bruce Clay will be offering further analysis and recommendations regarding nofollow on the June 24th episode of SEM Synergy.

In the years since the link element was first introduced, many Web site optimizers have come to use rel=”nofollow” to limit the transfer of PageRank through internal links on a site. PageRank (PR) is an important indicator of authority used by Google to rank pages in search engine results. PageRank sculpting involves including a nofollow element on links to internal pages not targeted for ranking in search engines. By directing PR only to theme landing pages, SEOs try to concentrate PageRank on pages best positioned to rank for targeted queries. This technique is a small part of the themed site architecture methodology known as siloing, discussed in more depth later.

Since nearly every advanced SEO uses the nofollow attribute on internal links, the Internet marketing community was eager for clarification following Matt’s initial comments.
source