If you’ve not played with the Yandex Blog Pulse tool, then it’s well worth adding it your bookmarks. Unlike the Google Trends tool, the Yandex one takes their data from the blogosphere, as indexed by their engine.

This data gives you some useful insight into hot trends and popular topics and keywords in Runet at the moment. It can also give you useful feedback on social media campaigns. Below I’ve pulled in the graph for “Яндекс” (Yandex) vs. Google. You can see there is quite a spike this month for the Yandex team.

Пульс блогосферы по запросам Яндекс и google

The statistics group at Yandex have released a study into the number of questions the search engine receives each day. Every day Russian users post 3 million queries in the form of questions.

The highest number of questions are asked on Monday with the least number being asked on Saturday. In 50% of the cases the users are interested in knowing “how” while only 1.6% of questions are cases of “why”. Useful information for those building a FAQ section for their Russian audience.

The most constantly asked questions are “How to lose weight?”, “How to download music?” and “What is love?”. Click here to download the PDF report in Russian.

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 too surprising. As I noted back in December, Mail.ru always had aspirations to enter the search market with their own technology. In one move they have managed to make Gogo.ru the third largest search engine in Runet with 9.1% market share.

Google still has the contract for their contexual results which makes Mail.ru their largest Russian publisher but it seems the plucky engine has decided that they need to carve their own place in the market. Google should look out for signs of them developing their own contexual system.

As my friend Svetlana Gladkova points out, the initial deal may have been to keep Google organic results as a backup plan while they tested Gogo.ru under pressure. Now the tests have been successful they have no reason to use Google results.

So Yandex loses the extra market share that Mail.ru provides but importantly to them, Google makes little ground on this deal. Yandex will keep their position as market leader with a comfortable 55% against Google’s 30%.

Time will tell if Mail.ru market share continues to climb. On historical evidence, Gogo.ru was not well received by Russian users with a market share of 0.3% at it’s peak in July 08 which tailed off to 0% for the last 9 months. Mail.ru is giving their search platform exposure but if the results are poor it may prove a risky strategy.

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 social network Bebo and ICQ.

Yandex and Rambler already cooporate with ICQ and have released their own branded versions of the popular messager client. According to IK “Finam”, ICQ revenues last year were between $30-40m. Yandex, according to their latest figures had total revenues in 2009 of 8.7b roubles (approx. $287.4m USD). The Russian market for contexual advertising is currently estimated to be 11.3b roubles (approx. $373.3m USD).

Sources close to the negotiation say that ICQ’s investors are looking for a figure around $200-250m (they paid $287m for the service in 1998 and have invested close to $120m in the platform since that time). However others feel this price is too high.

Tatiana Menkova, analyst at IK “Finam” believes the figure of $ 200 million for the company is overstated. On their assessment the company can cost a maximum of $60m. “If the amount required by AOL is too high, Yandex may well just continue to work with ICQ, or even start their own messenger,”

This point of view is echoed by Yandex’s press spokesperson, Ochir Mandjikov. He neither confirmed nor denied the information about the company’s participation in talks with AOL, saying that “the company is happy with the current cooperation with ICQ”.

Although many Russian users have registered accounts with ICQ the trend on the ground is to use alternative clients, which provide more functionality or allow users to access several chat networks at the same time.

In an attempt to retain marketshare ICQ often cuts access to their network from these unofficial clients. This upsets their users and each action from ICQ is followed by floods of complaints across Runet. As Svetlana Gladkova notes,

The major problem with AOL hoping to get the market share back to its official ICQ clients is that anyone who has ever tried both official ICQ clients and a deeply customizable and extendable with plugin client like Miranda will know that comparing the two is like comparing Internet Explorer to Firefox. Would you ever want to leave your Firefox with all your plugins and extensions and switch back to the rigid Internet Explorer?

I guess I know the answer and the answer is very similar for those who has been using unofficial – but much more powerful – clients with ICQ.

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 market share over here. They now hold 1% and are the 5th most popular engine in Runet.

While the proportion of Bing in Russia is not so high, we are very happy that one of the world’s largest companies expressed a desire to monetize in RuNet with the contextual technology of Yandex, stated the Yandex company blog.

This is an important deal but Yandex will be hurting from the loss of their contract with Mail.ru this week to Google. Mail.ru is the 3rd largest engine in Runet with 10%, so this represents a significant amount of advertising real-estate.

However, as my friend Yakov Sadchikov (CEO Quintura) does well to remind us:

Since the Russian contextual advertising market is vauled at $400 million per year, Yandex powering search ads on Bing will translate in several million in additional annual revenues for both Yandex and Microsoft.

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 10% and replaced Rambler as the third largest search engine in Runet. Google currently holds 30% against market leader Yandex with 53% (63% incl. Mail.ru results). This move effectively takes Google to 40% market share.

However this is probably only a temporary win for Google. The issue at the heart of the Yandex/Mail.ru split is the refusal from Mail.ru to brand their results as being powered by Yandex. The Russian search giant was reported to be unhappy with Mail.ru promoting their search technology as their own. Subsequently Google has won back the deal by agreeing to provide the engine with unbranded results.

Why is this important to Mail.ru? Well, Mail.ru have their own search aspirations. They have already developed a mobile search application and invested in their own search platform, GoGo.ru. So far the technology has not been a success, barely registering on market-share charts but they clearly want to head in this direction. As their press release states,

…Mail.Ru plans to actively develop its own search technology. The search “engine” will be used without mentioning the Google brand. Mail.Ru will be able to handle the requests of users using its own technology, in order to test and further improve their development, and as a consequence – the [search] product as a whole.

So count down the days until Mail.ru decides to dump both the search giants and go it alone. When 98% of Google’s revenue comes by the way of advertising, it makes sense to develop your own technology to capture that income stream.

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

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 traffic jams in Moscow)



• 90% of all search requests are for Russian content
• They index the whole web now, not just Russian material
• Finding talent is the key problem for Russian internet firms
• They have 2yr training program with Russian universities to teach linguistics, clusters and information technology.
• There is more money than brains in Russia. Viable ideas gain finance but finding talent is harder.
• IPO was planned a year ago but postponed. Now we consider it as a possible option. Due to the economic environment but also we have enough liquidity at the moment to do without it.
]]> http://www.russianmarketer.com/arkady-volozh-ceo-yandex-interview-cif-2009-prague/feed 0 http://www.russianmarketer.com/yandex-adopts-twitter-in-russia http://www.russianmarketer.com/yandex-adopts-twitter-in-russia#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:43:45 +0000 Nick Wilsdon http://www.russianmarketer.com/?p=493

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 the most popular ‘Twitterers‘ in Russian.

It looks like Twitter as a promotional channel is soon to hit the Russian marketing space.

Technorati Tags: Social Media, Twitter, Yandex

]]> http://www.russianmarketer.com/yandex-adopts-twitter-in-russia/feed 0 http://www.russianmarketer.com/yandex-rated-fastest-growing-global-search-engine http://www.russianmarketer.com/yandex-rated-fastest-growing-global-search-engine#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:41:28 +0000 Nick Wilsdon http://www.russianmarketer.com/?p=485

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 with 94% more searches than July 08.

LiveInternet, the Russian statistics site also gives positive news for Yandex, showing that they hold 51% market share against Google’s 30%. This figure is boosted by the continued rise of Mail.ru (10%), who uses Yandex search results to power their portal.

My friend Andy Atkins-Krüger has written an excellent summary today on why Yandex is doing so well (SearchEngineWatch.com).

Technorati Tags: ComScore, Google, Mail.ru, Yandex

]]> http://www.russianmarketer.com/yandex-rated-fastest-growing-global-search-engine/feed 1