The Next Web

Russian search engines Yandex and Rambler vs Google

By Ernst-Jan Pfauth
April 11, 2008
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Most European search markets are dominated by Google and there seem to be no real local competitors. In Russia however, a fierce battle for the search query’s of the consumers is going on. Yakov Sadchikov from Quintura even mailed me that “the Russian search engines are coming.” Well, I don’t think they will cross any borders, since their main advantage is the local knowledge and adaption to the Cyrillic alphabet. But they sure give Google a hard time on Russian soil.

Arkady Volozh
Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh

First there is Russia’s largest search engine Yandex, the first engine that revealed a billion pages outside the .ru domain. According to ComScore, Yandex is the no. nine search engine globally. They’ve launched their first vertical search engine, Yandex.Auto. A search engine for, you guessed it right, car classified ads. The crawler indexes over half a million listings of used cars from 30 Russian car sites. Search query’s can be specified by gearbox type, brand, color and whatnot. Yakov showed me an example of the results for Lamborghini.

Secondly, the search engine that comes right after Yandex is Rambler. They’re not in the world’s top ten yet, but are doing a good job with 300 million monthly searches and more than 37 million unique users in last February. Revenues of 2007 increased with 125% from 2006 to 69 million dollars.

So this upcoming engine has released a new version which is open to the public on beta.rambler.ru. The differences with the current version are mainly visual, also the focus of Rambler has shifted to vertical search. So there’s a thumbnail next to a search result and four categories – Internet, Top 100, News and Wikipedia – are marked with different colors.

Rambler

It seems like the Russian search engines are doing the opposite of what Google does, since they’re adding fancy add-ons, while Google still keeps it clean and simple. Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s time for specified and vertical search. Most of us are somewhat used to the complexity of the Web now, so we might as well be able to handle a search engine a bit more complicated than just a white page.

Ernst-Jan Pfauth editor in chief
Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

  • Indeed, Yandex and Rambler are very popular in Russian Internet circles. Personally I prefer Rambler for Russian perspective on news.
  • Indeed, Yandex and Rambler are very popular in Russian Internet circles. Personally I prefer Rambler for Russian prospective on news.
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  • Yakov
    I posted on Quintura blog an answer Yandex is successful in Russia http://blog.quintura.com/2008/01/25/yandex-does...
  • @Robin, Agreed, we tend to forget that there is a bunch of people out there who are still frightened by the web's complexity. Yet I believe that more and more people are used to a page like Google. I Mean, if millions of people know how to sign up at a social network, they might also be ready for vertical search.
  • Interesting article, and strange why Russia should be so particularly different. We've already seen (given the press about censorship issues) that Google is successful in China, and similarly in Japan, so it obviously can't just be based on the Cyrillic alphabet issues. What other factors do you think there are that make the Russian market specifically competitive?

    Also in regard to your comment; "Most of us are somewhat used to the complexity of the Web now..."

    I think that's a mistake many internet-savvy people make and there's a failure to acknowledge that a huge part of the population on the internet is not particularly experienced or comfortable with technology. So while greater functionality in terms of specified and vertical search might be useful to us, Google's interface demonstrates continued accessibility to the "average guy" who uses the internet occasionally rather than on a regular basis.
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