Posts Tagged ‘yandex’

Yandex – Yet ANother inDEX?

September 26th, 2011

There are parts of the world where Google is not dominant. In Russia the search engine Yandex is the market leader with a market share of over 60%. Helped by rapidly growing internet usage in Russia, the search engine doubled the number of searches it handles between 2008 and 2009. For online businesses operating in Russia there is no question about the importance of Yandex (for more about search engine marketing in Russia read our Internation Search Review post) but since the launch of an English language search engine in 2010 should the rest of the world be thinking about Yandex?

There are two aspects to this question:
1. Will Yandex gain a large worldwide market share?

2. Are there other reasons to observe what Yandex is doing?

Will Yandex gain a large worldwide market share?
In my opinion, no. Right now people have no reason to use Yandex. It is not integrated with any of the online services commonly used in the West, nor is it the default search engine on any of the main browsers. The only ways Yandex can increase market share are either by spending a lot of money on advertising (this is working, but very slowly, for Bing) or by being better at search than Google. Unfortunately for Yandex, they can’t just be a little bit better they need to be a lot better; studies (by Microsoft) show that people say the quality of results from Bing are equal to those of Google, but only when the Bing results are wrapped in Google branding. Any new search engine that wants to dominate the market needs to be an order of magnitude better, just as Google was in 1998.

The search technology behind Yandex
Google beat the competition with their PageRank algorithm. Page and Brin realised that strong webpages were more likely to be linked to from other strong webpages. In other words, they picked a feature that they thought good webpages should have and then built their search engine to rank pages with this feature.

Yandex’s MatrixNet algorithm is very different; given a list of good pages for a queryspace, MatrixNet uses machine learning to decide which features distinguish them from the average. Then they rank pages with similar features in that queryspace. This method is a great defence against spammers because any feature that becomes common is no longer a powerful ranking signal. For example, if everyone has an optimised title tag then having an optimised title tag is not a signal of quality.

The main weakness with the MatrixNet approach is getting the list of good pages to begin with. The internet is too large for this to be manually curated so there has to be another algorithm to generate the list of quality sites. This algorithm must be very conservative in the sites it selects, otherwise results quality will suffer a lot; imagine if having a large number of AdSense ads became a positive ranking factor!

Google’s recent Panda updates use a similar approach. Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) has said that they “came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side”. However, this algorithm update can only reduce rankings, not increase them so Google do not need to be as conservative with how it is applied (some site owners say they should have been a lot more careful).

As evidenced by their Panda update (and many other projects), Google has the technical ability to do machine learning at web scale. Should Yandex’s approach begin producing SERPs of amazing quality then Google can copy their approach before Yandex’s market share reaches critical mass. This is why Yandex need an order of magnitude improvement over Google; they need to capture a large amount of market share before Google improve their algorithm to match.

Why you should pay attention to Yandex
Like Yandex, the browser Opera also has a large market share in Russia without being a big player in the West. Opera introduced features like tabbed browsing and “speed dial” that have since been imitated by Firefox, Chrome and others. Web designers watch how Opera are innovating because some new features will cross over into the mainstream.

Similarly, you should keep an eye on what Yandex are doing because they take a different approach to search and successful features from their algorithm are likely to appear in other places.

Blog post by Richard Fergie, Consultant at Reform

Search Engine Marketing in Russia – International Search Review Issue 2

February 16th, 2010

Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the first issue of Reform’s International Search Review. Issue number two is now available, as we move north into Russia.  Like China, Russia is a large market where Google is not the search engine of choice, playing second fiddle to Yandex.ru.  As a result, SEO and general search marketing strategies from international companies looking to expand into Russia often find obstacles here.

For instance, it can be difficult for foreign companies to do PPC advertising on Yandex. Their PPC service is known as Yandex:Direct – which has a user interface for accounts that is entirely in Russian. Unless you have a fluent Russian PPC person on your team (and even then), potential advertisers are advised to let Yandex manage the PPC accounts on your behalf. This is known as the “Yandex.Direct Carefree account” – which their site says will provide you with a dedicated, English speaking account manager who will help you create and run your campaign (assistance with keywords selection, composing the ad text and advertising strategy consulting).

The initial take up of broadband was behind the pace of many other markets, but in the recent years Russia has started to really experience a steadier increase, becoming one of the top countries in regards to take up and usage of Mobile internet usage and Social Networking.   Russia is currently the eighth largest country in terms of internet user population, and is set to overtake the UK into seventh place.

Download a copy of the full “Russia Search Review” issue here

Take a look through the PDF and hopefully we can answer any questions about the search market share in Russia, along with the habits of the local internet user population there.

We look at the Yandex natural search algorithm, along with recent changes in Gogo.ru and Mail.ru, which had made an agreement with Google to use their natural search results, but instead opting to build their own algorithm first and using Google’s as a back up. Gogo.ru and Mail.ru do however use Google’s PPC results, which has helped extend its reach (and earnings) there. Considering Google had a 5% market share in Russia only 4 years ago, it has come a long way. But like in China, there are many factors which will try hard to make sure it never crosses the 50% line.

The overall search market share in Russia currently (along with other key stats from the PDF include):

- Yandex – 54.5% (62% when including Mail.ru) / Google 34.5% / Rambler – 1.9% / Bing – 0.4% (Source: Comscore, August 2009)

- 42,000,000 Internet users as of Jan 2010 and only a 33% estimated internet penetration.

- The average user in Russia spent 6.6 hours per month on social networks (highest in the world out of 38 countries that were reported), compared to a worldwide average of 3.7, 4.6 in the UK and 4.2 in the US. (World Metrix / Comscore: July 2009). The top choice of social network was Vkontakte.ru, followed by odnoklassniki.ru and mail.ru – while Facebook was a distant seventh.

- Twitter integration into search results was done on Yandex first in 2009 (before Google or Bing), yet Twitter usage in Russia is still relatively low, holding less than 0.5% of the overall global Twitter market share.

To get more details on this and everything else, download a copy of the full issue here – and let us know any comments / feedback.   Contact us, and we’ll get the next issue out to you before anyone else gets it!

You can also leave a comment below too.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform