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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As announced earlier this year, Yandex has finally opened their new offices in Silicon Valley, called Yandex Labs. Vish Makhijani, who previously held the position of Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo Search, has joined Yandex in the position of President and CEO of their new US technology and business development facility.
“We are [...]

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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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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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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 [...]

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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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On the 11-12th of November 2008 will be the 7th Annual Conference by Ashmanov and Partners; “Search Engine Optimization and promotion of sites on the Internet”. Catchy title eh?
Last year 1100 people attended, including representatives from all the search engines in Russia (Yandex, Rambler, Mail.ru, Google). There is also an expo hall, where 26 businesses [...]

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Yandex has announced a new vertical search engine for car sales in Russian, found at: http://auto.yandex.ru/. .
They are collecting adverts from all leading Runet car sites and aggregating them within the one search. The information and pictures are updated several times per day and the system can present results closest to the user’s location.
http://auto.yandex.ru/ [...]

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Yandex has announced a partnership with the Russian Development Bank (RBR) to expand their online payment system. Now payments to and from Yandex Money can be made from any of the ATMs belonging to the bank. As usual payments onto the system are free but withdrawals attract a 2% commission.
Web Money is still the most [...]

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Yandex, the leading Russian search engine has signed a deal with Kaspersky Anti-Virus to bundle their software free of charge into their desktop application, Ya Online.
Kaspersky has an understandably strong following in Russia, where it was founded in 1997. Although the companies head office is still in Moscow, they have expanded globally with offices in [...]

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