After negotiations last year, Google won the contract away from Yandex to provide Mail.ru with contextual and organic search results. However, it’s become clear that instead of a transition from Yandex to Google, Mail.ru seems to have decided to go it alone and use results from their own in-house search engine Gogo.ru.
This shouldn’t be [...]

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Kommersant reports that Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, is considering purchasing AOL’s ICQ platform at more than $200m.
ICQ has between 40m-50m registered users worldwide with the majority in Germany, Russia, Israel and Eastern Europe. In December of 2009 AOL announced that they would be restructuring and selling off some of that assets, including the [...]

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SearchEngines.ru reports that Yandex has just signed a deal with Bing (Microsoft) to add them to their contexual network. That means Yandex Direct adverts will now be shown on the Bing network in Russia.
Microsoft has not done so well in Russia to date with their MSN brand but Bing has been quietly picking up [...]

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Last week rumours of a potential Mail.ru/Google deal hit Runet. Although Google previously held a deal to provide organic and contexual advertising to the engine for 2003-2005. They lost this contract to Yandex at the end of 2005. Mail.ru confirmed the deal this morning.
Mail.ru is a rising star in Runet. It has built marketshare to [...]

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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 [...]

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Here’s a video interview with Arkady Volozh, CEO Yandex from the Prague CIF conference, in english. Some of the key points are summerized below:

Interview Points

Yandex currently has 60% market share
Russia’s mathematical heritage gives them their edge over other search engines
Reasons they are better than Google? Better search, more localised informational services (i.e. Yandex Maps shows [...]

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Twitter, the popular western micro-blogging tool, has now been adopted by Yandex, the largest search engine in Runet. This move will significantly improve their popularity and audience in Russia.
Yandex have started indexing the ‘tweets‘ (or messages) and allow users to search these on their advanced search page. They have also published a list of [...]

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ComScore has released a study of the global search market showing that more than 113 billion searches were conducted in July 2009, representing a 41% increase versus year ago. As expected Google was No.1 with 76.7 billion searches conducted, or 67.5% global market share. However the Russian portal, Yandex showed the fastest rate of growth [...]

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Josh Catone over at SitePoint reports that Firefox has decided to drop Google as their default search option for Yandex. This will effect all the versions they release for the Russian market. According to Mozilla General Counsel Harvey Anderson, the reason behind the change was a study of Russian user behavior conducted by Mozilla that [...]

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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 [...]

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