Davey Winder
Saturday, 28 June 2008 19:28
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Everybody, it might seem, uses Google to search the Internet. But not the Russians. They are far more likely to use Yandex, the most popular search engine you have never heard of. Yet!
Although you may well be scratching your head
when the
Yandex search engine is mentioned, this
is no newbie looking for a little space in the shadows of Google,
Yahoo! and Windows Live Search. Yandex actually got off the ground, in
Moscow, way back in 1997.
Since then, this search engine that understands the hugely complex
grammar of Russian linguistics has gone on to capture some 44 percent
of the Russian search market. According to comScore that puts it a good
10 points ahead of Google.
In fact, it puts Yandex firmly into the second most popular search
engine in Europe position. Not bad for a search engine nobody has heard
of outside the former Eastern Bloc countries. Yet the surprises have
not finished, because
according to BusinessWeek
Yandex is set to go public on Nasdaq and do so with quite a splash.
"Yandex is expected to list its shares on Nasdaq this fall, fetching as
much as $2 billion" BusinessWeek says, adding "That would be Russia's
largest-ever initial public offering in tech, valuing the company at
around $5 billion."
Let's not forget that Russia, whether it be in tech or in oil, is
currently something of a hot potato. That rare breed of an economy that
seems to be bucking the credit crunch doom and gloom. As such,
investors everywhere want a piece of Russian success.
Just what is the state of the Russian online economy? Read on to find out...
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