Russia’s Yandex Search Engine Goes Global

Yandex, the top search engine in Russia, has launched a global search engine at Yandex.com. And some of the early user feedback is quite good.

In its announcement (Russian language), Yandex calls this an “alpha service” and the “beginning of a long journey.” In this English-language news release, the company says it’s been indexing foreign web sites and adding the content to its search engine for the past two years.

In the Russian-language announcement, Yandex refers to this new, global search engine as “a platform for testing new algorithms [in] global search, and not a service for the audience.” But the early public feedback to Yandex.com results has been positive.

Nick Wilsdon, a search marketer based in Russia, wrote today:

“This isn’t a start-up but an established company with a substantial technological and financial base to work from. In the Russian market they have not only fought off Google but increased market share over the last 3 years.… This is clearly a shot over the bow of Google. And yes, they should be worried.”

Duncan Morris, of the UK-based search marketing agency Distilled, examined Yandex.com search results and asks if it’s “the best search engine in the world.”

“After a very brief play I’m incredibly impressed at the relative lack of spam and the quality of the results that are being returned. Not to mention the fact that there aren’t any ads.

Take for instance a search for “buy viagra online”, a hotbed of all that is bad on the internet. At the time of writing 3 of the top 5 results Google returns are from hacked .edu domains. It’s hard to look at viagra SERPS and not think spam, but Yandex returns the cleanest set of results I’ve seen for such a search.”

Yandex says it has indexed more than four billion pages in languages based on the Latin alphabet, the majority of which are English-language pages. It also says search results will expand later to “multimedia results and other useful answers.”