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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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 [...]

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Google’s recent change of policy in the UK to allow PPC advertising for online gaming has re-opened the issue in the Russian markets. This Friday Google started to allow online gaming advertisers to again participate openly in their PPC program, Adwords.
As NewMediaAge reports, the initial ban was enforced as part of a company-wide, global move [...]

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This interview is a little old but well worth watching if you are interested in the Russian Internet. It was carried out in April this year by the Russia Today network with Vladimir Dolgov, Head of Google Russia. RT do not offer embedded video, so just click this link or the image below.

Technorati Tags: Google, [...]

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This week Facebook has managed to throw MySpace from the No.1 spot, putting “considerably distance” between the two sets of audience figures. Facebook drew a massive 132m viewers in June while MySpace managed just 117.5m. The reason for this success? Facebook decided to embrace the multilingual audience and deliver the service in a range of [...]

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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/, [...]

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Bloomburg are reporting on the comments made by Vladimir Dolgov, Head of Google Russia, that online ad sales will jump fivefold in Russia to reach $1 billion in 2010.
In 2010, Google believes its operations in Russia could be tapping a billion dollar Internet advertising market. 2007 saw Russia grow to a $200 million bonanza in [...]

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Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia, recently launched their own portal for webmasters, similar to Google’s Webmaster Central panel.
Once they have verified their website(s), webmasters can access more information on their site’s listing within the Yandex engine. This includes which pages/sections Yandex has indexed, site errors and ingoing/outgoing links (totals plus exact URLs). Users [...]

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