If you list the search engines that you know, you most likely think of Yahoo or Bing, Ask for questions and answers, YouTube for videos and of course Google, which currently accounts for 90% of the searches carried out worldwide.
But today we want to talk about Yandex, the most used search engine in Russia as well as other countries of the former Soviet Union.
Yandex, the Russian Google
Yandex is a search engine, created by the company of the same name founded by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich in 1997. This multinational company specializes in services and products related to the Internet. Yandex is the largest technology company in Russia. And one of the most important and largest in Europe. It has 20 offices around the world and around 10,000 employees.
Taking into account the number of visits received and its Internet penetration, Yandex is the most used search engine in Russia and in some of the countries belonging to the former Soviet Union. It has a 65% market share in Russia, making it Google’s main competitor there. And in the world ranking Yandex occupies the fifth position of the most used search engines, after Google, Baidu, Bing and Yahoo!
Why has Yandex overtaken Google in Russia?
The main reason why Yandex is the preferred search engine for Russians is because the creators of Yandex put a lot of emphasis on developing a search engine that perfectly understood a Cyrillic alphabet that included the complex morphological inflections that the Russian language contains. Immediate recognition of the Russian language inflection in search queries.
Google took care of this task much later, but it was too late, because Yandex had already taken over the market, having conquered the Russian-speaking network and positioning itself even above its most direct Russian competitors; Rambler, a portal that had been on the market for a year and Mail.ru,a. And all this, despite the fact that these were already consolidated in the market.
Services offered by Yandex
Currently, Yandex provides its users with numerous services on its online portal and mobile applications of the same, available in English and Russian.
Yandex offers some very Google-like features, such as free email, (yandex mail) live traffic maps, (yandex maps) music, (yandex music) videos, (yandex video) photo storage, (yandex image) , etc.
In 2012, Yandex launched Yandex Browser, its own web browser, which is currently available for the main operating systems, whether desktop or mobile: Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, etc.
In 2017, Yandex launched its own AI personal assistant, Alisa, which was only in Russian, and was available on all major mobile platforms and Microsoft Windows.
Yandex also wanted to expand, try other technological and service branches, which is why it decided in 2018 to combine Yandex Taxi and Uber Russia in the same company, to try to give the user the best possible mobility service. But the agreement was not only for Russia, it was extended to other countries such as; Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Yandex aims to improve itself every day and that is why it is constantly developing in the search for new services to offer, in the development of new technologies that make life easier for its users.
In addition, the company has wanted to go a step further and operate outside of search engine technology. And now it is present in many other fields such as machine translation, the sale and delivery of products at home, deliver food, find and call a taxi, find a movie and even helps you with the education of your whole family, thanks to its huge database.
Yandex Featured Tools
There are many tools that this search engine offers and that are widely used in the field of digital marketing both in Russia and internationally.
Some of the most interesting are:
- Yandex Metrica, used primarily to measure results and perform in-depth web analytics.
- Yandex Webmaster; to index the websites you want using the robot.txt.
- Yandex Direct, which is a platform for managing sponsored ads.
- Yandex Wordstat for keyword organization and planning.
- It has also developed a voice assistant called Alisa, which is the equivalent of Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. And an autonomous car in tests.
- It also has a powerful translator that operates online and works with 80 different languages.
- An immersive image search engine that beats Google. Using extremely accurate facial recognition technology. Obtaining results even with people who had not used Yandex before.
History of Yandex
The development of the Russian Yandex search engine dates back to 1990 and came from the hand of two former employees of the company Arcadia, dedicated to searches in the Bible and in different patent files. They were; Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich.
But it was not until 1997 that the Yandex search engine was introduced to the public and began to enter the market.
Initially the search engine was developed by CompTek. But later in 2000 Yandex was incorporated as an independent company by Arkady Volozh.
Its curious name arises from a set of letters that comes from ‘yet another indexer’ which means (‘yet another indexer’, in English), they did it as an abbreviation and replaced the first two original letters with the Russian letter Я (‘Ya’), (‘yo’) to give rise to Яndex, ultimately becoming Yandex.