Where we Google, in Russia they Yandex
Jinfo Blog

21st August 2008

Item

Google http://www.google.com has become the main “go-to” website for quick research in almost every country we can think of. But if you were a researcher in Russia you would use Yandex http://www.yandex.ru instead. According to a recent Business Week article http://digbig.com/4xjgf, Yandex leads Google by 10% in its share of the Russian market, having a 44% share. Research company comScore Inc http://www.comshare.com ranks it the third search company in Europe http://digbig.com/4xjgg by number of searches undertaken at work and at home. Yandex has recently hit the news because it plans to list its shares on Nasdaq this autumn raising a suggested $2 billion. This would make it Russia’s largest initial public offering to date in the technology market http://digbig.com/4xjgh. Investors may be looking at the growing Internet market in Russia: at the moment a quarter of Russians are online, but high-speed connections are spreading throughout the country, according to the Business Week article. One likely investor is Alisher Usmanov http://digbig.com/4xjgj, the founder of Metalloinvest mining company http://www.metinvest.com and owner of publishing house Kommersant http://www.kommersant.com. (Yandex will be discussed in more detail in the September issue of VIP.)

« Blog