Russians more likely to say Yo Yandex than Go Google

Davey Winder
Saturday, 28 June 2008 19:28

Your IT - Home IT

Again, BusinessWeek suggests that the Russian search market that can expect to deliver some truly serious growth. After all, the online business is only just starting to take off in Russia. There are not many areas where you can still get in on the ground floor of an Internet revolution.

Currently broadband penetration is still low, around 10 percent, but forecasts suggest that will reach 30 percent by the year 2010. Google is certainly taking it seriously as a market to watch, predicting that search related advertising in Russia will surpass the USD $1 billion mark by 2010. Last year it was just USD $200 million.

Certainly, despite the rise of Yandex in Russia, you should not be buying nails for the Google coffin just yet. The first Google office in Russia only opened in 2006 and in that short time has managed to claw a search market share of 34 percent. Up from just 5 percent in 2005.

By providing a truly localised version of the Google product, including a search algorithm that has been specifically tweaked to deal with that Russian language problem, it has shown that it is taking the fight against Yandex very seriously indeed. Russian versions of YouTube and Google Maps just help to confirm its Eastern European intent.

Wikipedia suggests that Yandex is an acronym derived from 'Yet Another iNDEXer' and describes how a backwards R in Russian means the same as I in English, which somehow makes this a bilingual pun on the word index. I have to admit that I really do not get this myself.

So what is the bigger picture as far as Russian search is concerned? Read on to find out...

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