With more than 102 million Internet users in Russia, equivalent to about 71% of the population in Russia, Russia is ranked sixth in the list of countries that use the Internet most in terms of the number of users.
With such a large number of Internet users, Russia is an attractive market for many companies competing for the interest of the Russian user.
Search engines also compete to attract 102 million users in Russia, which is a treasure for those companies, and in this article we will show you the most powerful Russian search engine.
While the business prospects offered by the largest market in Europe are interesting, these competing companies must understand the complexity of the Russian digital market well in order to succeed there and get what they are looking for, because the Russian Internet market is so different and unique.
Russia is one of those few countries in which Google does not control the Internet market in absolute terms, but on the other hand, the Russian search engine Yandex succeeds in maintaining its appearance in that market.
What is the most famous russian search engine?
One of the most famous Russian search engines is Yandex, and since its inception in 1997 it ranks first in terms of the number of users and the acquisition of the Russian market. but after Google entered the Russian market in 2006, it represented a fierce competitor to Yandex and finally acquired the first place as the most used search engine. In Russia, since July of the last year 2019.
Statcounter has compiled a list of the most famous russian search engines and their share of the Russian market, as follows:
- Google search engine - 52.24%.
- Yandex search engine - 44.38%
- Mail.ru - 2.22%
- Bing - 0.54%
- Yahoo search engine - 0.24%
- DuckDuckGo - 0.24%
These ratios indicate that Google and Yandex are far better than the rest of the competitors.
What is Yandex?
Yandex N.V is a Russian company that provides multiple services over the Internet, and the company is famous for its search engine, which we mentioned above is ranked second in the list of the most popular and used search engines in Russia.
The services provided by Yandex also include the following services:
- Internet advertising
- Its own internet browser called Yandex Browser
- Email services via Yandex.Mail
- Transportation services via Yandex.Taxi in cooperation with Uber
- Map services via Yandex.Maps
- Data management services
- Application Analysis Services
- Artificial intelligence services
- Smart home technology
The Russian company offers many other services as well.
Its foundation
Yandex was founded in 1997 by Arkady Volozh, and he is the CEO of the company until now. In addition to Arkady Borkovsky and Ilya Segalovich, the trio chose the name Yandex, derived from “Yet Another INDEXer”.
The market value of Yandex in 2018 was estimated at about 12 billion US dollars, and the share price is currently 44.34 US dollars on the Nasdaq Global Stock Exchange. The Russian company achieved profits of about $ 1.85 billion in 2018, an increase of 13.52 percent over 2017.
Yandex search engine
Google's search engine has similar functions and services to most global search engines, as it has a space in its interface to type the words you are searching for, and then press Enter for the search engine to display the results page. Which contains a set of links and pages that display the desired content.
The Russian search engine displays results based on your choice, choosing between web pages, images, videos, or other types of search results.
I tried searching for several different terms and the results are usually excellent, and most likely the results are the same as that of the Google search engine.
However, sometimes the search results change randomly to the Russian language even with the use of the English version of the site, which differs from the Russian version via the domain, the English version ends with .com and the Russian version ends in .ru.
Also interestingly, the site allows you to view search results via Google and Bing. You will find this option at the bottom of every page of the search results, and you can use this option if you are not satisfied with the results Yandex itself shows.
In an interview conducted by Search Engine Journal with the Yandex search engine team, the team said that voice searches are currently 20 percent of the total searches.
Yandex's share of the Russian market
As mentioned above, Yandex is the second most used search engine in Russia and has a market share of 44.38% of the Russian market, compared to Google's share of 52.24% of the same market.
You should keep in mind that these percentages vary depending on the source, and this source as we mentioned before is the Statcounter website report on Russian search engines issued in December 2019.
However, you should know that Yandex is a popular search engine in many other countries, not only in Russia, and most of those countries are members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which was established by the countries that represented the Soviet Union such as Ukraine and Belarus, for example.
This is the share of Yandex in the markets of the following countries:
- Russia: 44.38%
- Belarus: 22.38%
- Kazakhstan: 21.88%
- Uzbekistan: 21.88%
- Turkey: 10.67%
- Turkmenistan: 6.73%
- Ukraine: 5.98%
- Armenia: 4.20%
- Moldova: 3.40%
- Georgia: 2.85%
- Azerbaijan: 2.06%
In all of those countries mentioned above, Yandex is the second most popular search engine after Google, and that might make sense for the large number of Russian speakers in all of those countries.
It is interesting information that Yandex has been banned in Ukraine since 2017, but many people still use it by using a VPN to be able to unblock the ban applied to it.
But given the global percentage, Yandex is still a small search engine with a market share of only 0.55%.
However, this small percentage makes it the fifth most used global search engine, after Google, Bing, Yahoo and Baidu, and it comes after Yandex search engine DuckDuckGo with a rate of 0.54%.
How does the Yandex search engine maintain its position in the Russian market despite the fierce competition with Google
1- Designed specifically to match the Russian language
The Russian language is vastly different from the English language, starting with the alphabet, passing through the structures, meanings, and everything. In the Russian language, each word can contain 20 different conjugations, and there are three different types of nouns, and this affects the rest of the words in the sentence, which makes Russian a very complex language.
But since Yandex has specifically designed its search engine to serve French speakers, this gives it a huge advantage among Russian users.
2- Ecosystem
The main page of the Russian Yandex search engine contains more than just a search box, it is also a portal that provides the latest important news, weather forecasts, and allows you to quickly access other Yandex services such as e-mail, maps, and others.
Which means that Yandex users prefer it for its services and not just for the purpose of Internet search.
3- Android gives users the freedom to choose between Google and Yandex
In 2017, Google agreed to stop making Google the default search engine for Android phones. Instead, it provided users with free choice to choose between its search engine and Yandex, which led to the rapid growth of Yandex's share in the Russian market.
4- The fact that Russians do not trust American products
A large percentage of Russian Internet users prefer the Yandex search engine to the Google search engine, simply because they do not trust American products.
Some may choose to support Russian companies rather than foreign companies, especially American companies.
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