The 2008 Russian Internet or Runet Awards were given away last week in a lavish ceremony held in Moscow. Russian singers and celebrities were among the audience as leading players in Russian internet industry were awarded for their contribution to the development of the Russian segment of the internet.

The awards have been running since 2004 and the project is paid for by the Federal Agency for Print and Mass Communication in Russia (FAPMC). A reflection of the support governmental agencies have for the development of the internet in Russia.

Rambler and Microsoft won awards for Technology and Innovation while Google.ru beat Yandex.ru by one place in the People’s Top 10 category. The full results of this section are below and give some insight into the popular websites in Runet at the moment.

1. Odnoklassniki.ru
2. Tsitatnik Runeta
3. Web service UcoZ
4. Mail.ru
5. National bittorrent tracker
6. Google.ru
7. Yandex.ru
8. Legend: Legacy of Dragon
9. Russian Wikipedia
10. Online game 11×11

You can download an official video of the night’s entertainment (2 hrs 35mins) in FLV Format (269 MB) or WMV Format (1310 MB). I’ve included a short clip below.

Technorati Tags: Премия Рунета, Runet Awards, Russian Internet

According to Interfax, Googles proposed deal to puchase the contexual ad provider, Begun.ru, for $140m was shot down by the Russian Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) on Thursday.

The reason cited has been a lack of clear information on the “individuals who can exert influence on the activity of the Google group, as well as a list of persons belonging to the Google group, including those outside Russia”. Without this information, the FAS board do not feel they can “objectively judge the impact on competition in the market for Internet search in our country”. Plus they have “concerns” that competitive conditions will be made worse by reducing the number of large players.

Ever since the deal was announced industry experts have speculated that Begun’s future is in doubt, considering that Google has such a well developed contexual ad system and brand of its own (Adwords). The value in Begun seems to lie with their contextual contracts, trained support staff and business customers. Rumours have also been circulated that Google was planning to provide organic results to Rambler as part of the deal. Either of these moves would effectively remove players from the Russian search scene.

“We’re very disappointed”, said Google PR Director in Russia, Alla Zabrovskaya. “We continue to believe that this transaction has improved the range of opportunities for Russian Internet users, advertisers, as well as the development of the industry as a whole. We now await the decision in the hands of the FAS and then will decide on our future actions”.

This is a massive blow to Google in the Russian market, which they recently estimated to be worth $1bn by 2011. This purchase would have consolated their position against market leaders Yandex. Begun.ru provides contexual advertising streams to a range of high profile sites, notably Rambler, the oldest search engine in Russia.

According to LiveInternet, Yandex holds 44.7%, against Google with 34.6%. Rambler has seen their market share plummet this year to 7.1% from 17% this time last year, despite the appointment of Ex-Yahoo! European Head Mark Opzoomer. Mail.ru, the other major player in Russian search has seen a rise in marketshare to 7.7%. Having cancelled a deal to carry Google’s contextual adverts in January of 2007, they have since been in partnership with Yandex.

So what does this FAS ruling mean? According to RosFinCom, things may not be so bad. The deal may still go through once Google meets the demands of the FAS board. “Finam” Vladislav Kochetkov agreed, “In our view, there is a great likelihood that the transaction will soon take place”. Not so, says Alexander Kuznetsov, an analyst at ING Wholesale Banking, who suggests the FAS is just looking for formal reasons to reject the deal. He maybe right.

As Kuznetsov points out, the marketshare Google will gain is not such a monopoly. He proposes that together they would only occupy 21% of the market. LiveInternet would put that nearer to 42% against Yandex with 53%. However you can find much higher percentages in the Russian telecommunications industry that have failed to draw regulator concern. Russian industry is defined by monopolies.

If this is not due to the marketshare, could it be more to do with Google’s position as a foreign company? Russian lawmakers have been taking an increasing interest in the Internet and pushed to have it included as a sector “strategically important to national security” in a law passed this April. That would have required foreign investors wishing to purchase more than 50% of a Russian company related to the Internet to obtain the approval of the Russian Government.

The bill was amended after intervention by President Medvedev but the list of strategic sectors still includes television/radio broadcasting and publishing. Companies that hold a dominant position in providing internet and telephone services are also included. In those cases, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service can apply “limitations”. The FAS definition of “dominant” is defined for us by Russian Law News:

Article 5 of the New Law states that unless otherwise demonstrated, a business entity with more than 50% market share is presumed dominant; and less than 35% market share is generally not dominant. However, a group of up to three market leaders may be deemed dominant if they have aggregate market share of 50%; and the same applies to a group of up to five market leaders with aggregate market share of 70% (unless one of them has a market share below 8%)

Are we currently seeing the first “limitations” placed on Google by the FAS, to prevent them developing a dominant position in Runet? The Russian authorities can be deeply suspicious of foreign companies and publicised connections between Google and the CIA are unlikely to work in their favour. It is certainly a strange request by the FAS to know more about “individuals who can exert influence on the activity of the Google group”.

Government protection would give the home-grown engine Yandex a significant advantage and prevent the market domination Google has enjoyed across US and Europe. If their advancement in Russia has just become political, this may prove to be the greatest challenge the US search giant has faced to date.

Technorati Tags: Begun, FAS, Google, Monolpoly, Russia, Russian Anti-Monopoly Service, Yandex

On the 27th July, Radio Station Ekho Moskvi (Moscow Echo) invited the ex-Managing Director of Rambler for an interview on the latest deal between Rambler and Google. This is an English translation of the show you can watch below:

Igor Ashmanov started his interview with answering some questions about his web service, search engine analyzer http://www.analyzethis.ru/, which gives a comparative analysis and operational data of search engines working on the Russian search market.

The first question was absolutely obvious, and has been widely discussed in the Russian media recently; Is Rambler dead?

No, not yet. Although, my point of view is very subjective. No, it is not dead. But the step made by Rambler towards using Google search on their portal is ambiguous. The issue of using Google search instead of leading development and investing in their own search engine was discussed in 2000 when Rambler was bought by a group of investors.

Igor also pointed out that the Google agreement terms are very harsh for the party using it on their site. Google doesn’t allow to change their search results. So Rambler will be obliged to show it as it is.

Yandex or Google, who will be the leader?

Rambler was #1 search engine in runet for a long period of time. Only at the beginning of 2003 it began to lose its position. People say, it seems that none uses Rambler today, what is absolutely not true. Rambler has very specific users, it has always been a search engine for internet geeks (hard users).

Internet novices tended to use Yandex more because it was for teenagers. 12% of runet searchers still use Rambler. It is the 3rd most popular portal in Runet (after Mail.ru and Odnoklassniki.ru). Today they start positioning Rambler as a multi service portal like Yahoo.

Still will the main struggle for search take place between Google and Yandex?

The situation is quite unstable. In case Rambler uses Google search on the portal, Google takes another 10%-12% of the search share. Another possible situation is that Mail.ru leaves Yandex Search for Google, just because Google pays more. In this case Google has another 8% share.

Rambler has its obvious unique search features. When it abandons its own search engine and uses Google Search, will it lose some of its obvious characteristics for user?

Having its own search technology is an advantage. Search engines can collect some important user data and surfing habits and improve their results. So from the point of view of Rambler leaving back its search engine is a strategic fault.

Are there any new search engines to take part in the competition for search in Runet, for example, Gogo.ru or others?

Mail.ru doesn’t have a strong understanding whether they need their own search engine or not. Mail.ru is a multi service portal specializing in communications. They can always speculate that they can use their own search engine instead of Yandex or Google.

In this case they will have to invest money and people, the main problem is in finding people and creating a team for that. So if Mail.ru creates its own search engine, it will have 10% share like Rambler. At the moment Gogo.ru (Mail.ru) is not indexing the whole runet, it has limitations and it is unstable.

What about Nigma.ru as a potential competitor?

Nigma is a meta search engine. They have their own index which is not big, many times less than Google or Yandex have. Moreover they have a deal with Yandex and are showing Yandex context ads.

Nigma is popular today because people think they will get more relevant results when they search in several search engines at a time. But I doubt the results are really relevant.

What is the difference in search results between Google and Yandex?

There are different search queries. Google and Yandex are strong in different search queries:

Information search – Google is stronger.

Navigation query, for example when we search for some domain – it has always been the strong point of Google, but since last summer Yandex results are also getting better.

Transaction search (when you want to buys something, pay for something, service search) – Yandex is strong here due to Yandex.Market.

That is why average Internet searcher uses Google and Yandex for different things.

What about Yandex index in the foreign Internet?

Yandex has now 1 billion pages in its index.

What happens if Mail.ru applies Google search instead of Yandex on the portal? Does it influence somehow the market?

8% search share depends now on Mail.ru. In Case Mail.ru puts Google logo it will surely influence Google brand recognition in runet. So it can influence on the search market on the whole.

What has changed from the old times of runet (96-97)?

In those times search queries were much simpler. It was a one word query. But today with the information rise the query is lengthening. People more and more are asking questions to search engines. We are coming more closer to natural language. Search engines will be forced to understand such queries as natural questions asked by users.

What are search shares today?

Due to LiveInternet statistics Yandex has 56% in working days and 52% at weekends. Google on the contrary has 21% and 25%. What does it mean? Yandex is used by office people, not hard users of Internet. Google is used by internet geeks, attached to Internet and having Internet connection at home.

For Google it is a question of positioning themselves on the market to make a step forward to average and mass users.

What about providing opportunities for news search from Google and Yandex. Is there any difference?

Igor Ashmanov pointed out they have their own news aggregating project, novoteka.ru . Sure they will never have so many visitors as Yandex have. Google is new to News search. This feature has been available since last year. But the drawback of Google that it aggregates for Russian users not only Russian news, but also news from Ukraine or Belarus.

Google had also problems with Russian morphology, in case of search called machine morphology. So they took some free morphology and set it for their needs.

What is the future for a national search engines?

National search engines are still strong in China, Czech Republic, Korea. They have potential to grow. Yandex share is growing due to that Rambler is losing its share, Google and Yandex both take up the users.

In English they have the verb googled, why we don’t have yandex something?

In Russian we have to use endings foe verbs. So it will sound like Яндекснуть (yandexnut’). Hard for the Russian ear.

What about mobile search, who is leading here?

Mobile search in runet is still not occupied and doesn’t have a leader. And still there are 5 times more owners of mobile phones in Russia than Internet users. So there are potential searchers.

Google has the potential to be the leader here as it can have agreements with mobile phone producers like Nokia, or telecommunication companies like MTS or Beeline (Google can simply pay for entering this market). Several local projects feel good on mobile market like Wap start. Some companies even sell context ads, Mobile direct.

Technorati Tags: Ashmanov, Gogo, Google, Mail.ru, Rambler, Runet

It’s important to know the main user-agents and search engine spiders in Runet. This can give you information on the indexing of your site, if you understand the various roles each search engine robot plays. It can also allow you to see when your competitors or link partners are cloaking their content. Inserting the following user-agent strings into the User Agent FireFox Plugin would allow you to browse the web as Yandex or Rambler.

Yandex

Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; I)
Main Yandex Robot

Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; H)
Robot looking for mirror copies or duplicates

Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; P)
Robot for Images

Yandex/1.02.000 (compatible; Win16; F)
Robots which indexes favicons

Yandex/1.03.000 (compatible; Win16; M)
Robot to find keywords highlighted in the cache

Yandex/1.03.003 (compatible; Win16; D)
When you add your URL to Yandex this spider is activated

YaDirectBot/1.0 (compatible; Win16; I)
Robot for sites which install the Yandex Direct publishing code (Yandex Direct Partners/Affiliates)

YandexBlog/0.99.101 (compatible; DOS3.30,B)
Robot which indexes XML files for blog search (RSS/Atom)

Yandex/2.01.000 (compatible; Win16; Dyatel; N)
Robot which indexes news streams for Yandex News

Yandex/2.01.000 (compatible; Win16; Dyatel; C)
Robot which checks the availability of sites inside Yandex Catalog/Directory. If they are not available for a few days the site will be removed.

Yandex/2.01.000 (compatible; Win16; Dyatel; D)
The robots moderates Yandex Direct links inside adverts

Yandex/2.01.000 (compatible; Win16; Dyatel; Z)
Robot for the Yandex Bookmarks service

Rambler

StackRambler/x.x
Main Rambler search (Russia) robot (81.19.6x.xx)

Google

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

**Amazing Nanobot image by Ajax, one of the artists at TheLensFlare.com**

Technorati Tags: Cloaking, Rambler, Search Engine Spiders, User-Agents, Yandex

Rambler is often criticized for their lack of development. Google has set the pace and Yandex has more than caught up, released a wide range of applications and services. So it’s good to see some developments at Rambler, which currently holds no.2 position by Russian IP. Change has come in the form of a new modern interface design for the search engine, which can now be viewed in beta form.

The interface is a very clean design, a good step away from their cluttered and rather dated portal look. It emphasizing their services, especially rich-media offerings such as video search and images. They are also making the services they have developed more prominent, such as their job vacancy search.

The layout is good and definitely gives them a better direction. However it does feel a little empty of substance, highlighting how few meaningful services Rambler have developed. For example, their Maps section takes the user to search results for maps (unless very specific), rather than the visual service you would expect from Google or Yandex.

They also have a search section they have termed ‘Wikipedia’. This is a little confusing for me, as copyright issues aside the user is simply given results from the Russian and English versions of Wikipedia (results for ‘God‘ and ‘Putin‘). You are left wondering why you would use Rambler to search this platform rather than Wikipedia’s own internal search facilities.

Looking through the options I got the sense that many of these simply ‘pad out’ the new services orientated design rather than give the user original or valuable functionality.

However this is a step in the right direction and a positive sign for future developments coming out Rambler. As any observer in this industry knows, the days of simply offering search are long gone now. Search engines are expected to deliver added value for their users and use these developments to increase brand loyalty, audience numbers and advert distribution. If Rambler hopes to keep Google at bay for 2nd place, they will need to throw themselves head first into this strategy.

Technorati Tags: Rambler, Russia, Search Engines, Wikipedia

Rambler is the second most popular search engine for Russian users with roughly 22% market share. One of their more popular tools is the Rambler Top 100 List, which shows the most popular sites in Runet. All you have to do to be included in this directory is to make use of their free online statistics service. As you might imagine, that has made it a very popular service and you frequently find the Rambler Top 100 icons in the footers of Russian websites.

Rambler generates this icon code for the user with their unique ID in the string. Once you know the ID for any site using the system, you have access to their online statistics.

You can see a live example of this issue at the leading automobile site in Russia, AutoNews.ru. If we look through their source we can quickly identify the Rambler code below. They even comment it for us!

<!-- Rambler Top100 --><img src="http://counter.rambler.ru/top100.cnt?286377" width=1 height=1 border=0><!-- /Rambler Top100 -->

The next step is to take this ID code, 286377 and place it into the following URL. You can then view that website’s statistics.

http://top100.rambler.ru/cgi-bin/stats_top100.cgi?286377

There you go (link | english version). Instant access to the statistics from one of the leading sites in Runet. Niche research is made easy, as Rambler100 lists the most popular sites by category. Page views, unique visitors and most popular entry points. I’m sure you can all think of some uses for this kind of market intelligence.

Why is this information public

That is a good question and one I have been asking Russian companies. Two reasons seem to have constently come up in conversation. First, they like to show how popular their websites are, as a badge of honor. The second reason is that using a third party statistics system like Rambler Top 100 allows them to give potential advertisers trustworthy figures.

It seems that Russian companies are not afraid of publicising their figures. Although you can opt to hide some details of your traffic, even these accounts show a considerable amount of useful information. As one unnamed search engine employee commented to me, local SEOs have probably not learnt to take advantage of this data, so companies are unaware of its strategic value.

Technorati Tags: Competitor Research, Rambler, Russia, Statistics

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