Gemma Birch WebCertain.com
Specialist in online marketing, seo and ppc

Here, Eugene answers a few questions on how the search engine maintains its strong position in one of the most exciting global internet markets.

Yandex is still the clear market leader in Russia and showing no signs of losing any market share. Why is it so popular in Russia, and how does it retain its users?

Russians have always been good at math and that helped us cultivate a one-of-a-kind style of programming and nurture a rich engineering environment in this country. This also was something that helped Russia join a small club of nations with a technologically competitive on a global scale search engine of their own.

But, a world-class technology alone wouldn’t cut it. What is also important is to understand the users, their interests and the market. At the time when Yandex was launched what gave us the edge on the market was our knowledge of the Russian language morphology. This allowed us, among other things, to index and deliver many more documents than our competitors. Today, we also need to consider a number of other important factors such as a user’s location. This has become essential as each city in Russia differs from other cities considerably, having its own specific local content, maps, news, products, popular websites etc… As soon as we realized that, we concentrated our effort on localisation. Last year, we rolled out our new algorithm MatrixNet that allowed us fine-tune our page ranking and deliver search results depending on what city the user is in. Global players would struggle to do that as their targeting works on a country level.