Yandex Archive

Earlier this week, we took a look into the offices of Russian search engine giant Yandex. Today Yandex has announced a new partnership with Facebook in which Yandex will integrate information from the social network on the Yandex website. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

From the partnership announcement, “Yandex makes its services more attractive for the users of social networks, including those with a Facebook account. So, the portal’s front page hosts a Facebook widget and the company’s own instant messaging service Ya.Online informs its users of new notifications on the networking website. In addition, Yandex will now add the data from Facebook into its blog search index improving its international search and boosting new, recently created pages’ indexing. Specifically, Facebook will provide Yandex with a syndication feed that gathers information about updates on its Pages and profiles created to represent public figures, businesses or organisations.”

If you click the Facebook widget (seen below), it does request access to basically your entire Facebook account. This is different than the Like badges seen on many blogs and websites.

Javier Olivan, Head of International at Facebook, noted regarding the new partnership, “We feel that this partnership will bring a lot of value for our Russian users as we would like the public information on Facebook to be easily searchable via Yandex.”

By now most of us have seen inside the Google offices via photos like the ones HongKiat put together of Google’s locations around the world. Stephen from Office Snapshots has some photos from the Apple HQ in Cupertino, California. We’ve covered Russian search engine Yandex several times and I know you were left wondering what their offices look like and how they differ from the offices of U.S. search engines.

Here’s a look (translated)  into the Yandex office at nighttime. EnglishRussia notes, “The office works round-the-clock seven days a week. There is no provision for time of coming and leaving of employees – you can work at night if you want, but must do your work well…The only thing they don’t have – sofas. It is made specially that employees go home at least to sleep.” They have smoking rooms as well – something I am guessing Google does not offer as part of their compensation package.

Here are a few of the photos I liked – check out the full gallery for a full office photo tour.

They grow plants inside the office – those lights help the plants grow

Continue reading “A Look Inside the Offices of Russian Search Engine Yandex” »

Yandex has started powering search contextual ads on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Here is a screenshot and link to search result page on Bing.com for a search query “Туры” (Tours) that displays Yandex.Direct advertisements both above the Bing.com’s search results and alongside them (to the right).

Yandex has announced a deal with Microsoft’s search engine Bing on its blog. The Yandex.Direct ads has been tested on Bing since September 2009.  The blog post said that “in so far, a share of Bing in Russia is not that big, but [Yandex] is very glad that one of the world’s largest companies has decided to monetize in RuNet with a help of Yandex’s contextual technologies”.

Bing holds 0.8% search market share in Russia, behind Yandex with 58.3%, Google with 23.0%, Mail.ru with 10.2%, and Rambler with 3.8%, according to LiveInternet.ru. Yandex held 54.5% of searches in Russia, Google – 34.5%, Mail.ru – 7.4%, Rambler – 1.9%, Bing – 0.4%, said comScore last August.

Since the Russian contextual advertising market is vauled at $400 million per year, Yandex powering search ads on Bing will translate in several million in additional annual revenues for both Yandex and Microsoft.

Continue reading “Yandex to Power Search Ads on Bing” »

Yakov at Quintura has a post today discussing the state of the Russian online advertising market. That data comes from Russian media site MindShare Interaction. Yakov notes, "the Russian contextual advertising accounted for 8.9 billion rubles ($357 million) or 60 percent of total online advertising spending, while display advertising accounted for 5.8 billion rubles ($233 million) or 40 percent of the total spending."

The top categories were: automobile manufacturers, consumer goods, industrial equipment manufacturers and home appliance manufacturers. The list seems similar to that of the U.S.

Russian search provider Yandex controls over 70% of the contextual advertising market in Russia. For reference, Google controls 8% of the contextual ad market.

Check out our in-depth interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich. Yandex was also rated one of the top 10 Web sites in Russia by GOAL.

Quintura is reporting that the founder of Metalloinvest holding and owner of Kommersant publishing house, Alisher Usmanov is seeking a 10-20% stake in Russian search engine Yandex. Based on the current valuation for Yandex of $5 billion, this puts Usmanov’s stake at up to $1 billion.

Usmanov and his companies have minority stakes in the holding companies for mail.ru and Live Journal. This type of deal could put Usmanov into a strong position with the largest Russian mail provider and the largest Russian search engine. In case you were wondering, Yandex currently has 54% market share in Russian search while Google is at 19%.

Check out our exclusive interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich to learn more about the largest search engine in Russia.

Russian leader in search Yandex has announced plans to acquire SMIlink, a provider of traffic services. Yakov over at Quintura has the details on the acquisition. Note that SMIlink’s traffic services are not Web traffic-based but rather actual traffic out in the streets of Russia.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. SMIlink has a staff of about 70.

Check out our in-depth interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich. Yandex was also rated one of the top 10 Web sites in Russia by GOAL.

Russian consulting firm GOAL is out today with a new report that shows the top Web sites in Russia. The report is a great read if you are interested in learning more about Russia and its Web economy. There’s also a discussion of international players in Russia which includes Google, YouTube, LiveJournal, RapidShare and Yahoo.

The report includes the following categories: Social networks, blogs, photos, videos, news, dating, Q&A, bookmarking, music, citations, search engines and RSS, file storage, wish lists and start pages.

There’s only one issue with the report. They used Alexa as their sole basis of measurement to rank the sites. While that basically makes the actual numbers very suspect, I’d still recommend reading the site for the information provided about each site.  You can download the entire report here (it’s free).

Here are their Top 10 Russian Web Sites (remember that the list is generated by Alexa rankings):

Vkontakte.ru – a successful clone of Facebook. Vkontakte is the most visited site in Russia. It has over 13 million registered users.

Mail.ru is Russia’s leading mail portal, which has grown to include many other social networking features.

Yandex.ru is Russia’s leading search engine, with additional services including email, news etc. The search engine is optimised for the morphology of Russian language.

Odnoklassniki.ru has been sweeping Russia by storm. It is a simple tool to find schoolmates. Odnoklassniki is the fourth most visited site and has 18 million registered users.

Rambler.ru is another very successful search engine. It offers services such as photo and video sharing, dating and games. It owns Russia’s most popular messenger / VoIP phone system ICQ.

LiveInternet.ru is Russia’s leading website of personal blogs, but in reality it combines various online services including web mail, dating and file sharing.

LiveJournal.ru, the US blogging site, has become a phenomenon in Russia, forming the most lively uncensored information portal. From journalists and government critics to pop singers and comedians, many well known personalities share their views on current events.

Loveplanet.ru is Russia’s leading dating website, which claims to have 11 million registered users.

Smotri.ru is Russian analog of YouTube, and despite rated by Alexa at the place number 36, has shown the highest level of visits amongst the independent video sharing sites with the exception of YouTube itself.

Diary.ru is a blogging site, which allows its users to form communities.