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 [...]

The financial crisis has been hard on Russia, with direct foreign investment dropping 45% in the first half of 2009 to $6.1 billion. The economy is expected to shrink 8.5% this year and inflation is in double digits. Some commentators have even begun to refer to the “Bic” economies (Brazil, India, China) rather than the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This week The Moscow Times has conducted a series of interviews on the state of e-marketing in Russia. Essential reading for anyone working in or considering expanding into RuNet. These should remain open to public viewing, follow the links below: Changes in Consumer Preference on the InternetBy Inessa Ishunkina, Project director TNS Russia RuNet of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]