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I believe a "different alphabet" causes a delay for majority of the population accessing services from an English-language based services and gives local startups time to excel before the US ones start the worldwide expansion. In latin and other countries within the US sphere of influence, the general population is more inclined since a long time to consume US products even if they aren't localized.

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Actually, Yandex predates Google. But Google still managed to win in russian speaking markets. They couldn't surpass Yandex only in Russia I think. Vkontakte, on the other hand, was a Facebook clone that had time to excel before its worldwide expansion.

Yandex predates Google just like many other search engines predated Google but couldn't give relevant results. But I suspect Google's page rank algorithm was the deal and Yandex at some point improved their search results after Google was the hot kid.

Now that LinkedIn is banned in RF (is it still?) there's a chance for moikrug or other local startups to come up.

In Moscow I have seen and met (including Yandex) dozens of startup guys copycatting successful US ones. I was always curious why they were more successful than the Berlin ones or other west and east European ones. My conclusion has been the cyrillic alphabet. Of course a country of ~150millions with CIS expansions.

I would assume China, Korea, Japan, and some south Asian countries with a different alphabet and a large population offer the same opportunity to to startups.

Curious case is India - and I don't remember they having winner tech giants except outsourcing ones.

No, I think Google was catching up to Yandex, because pagerank alone was not enough to give relevant results in russian. Eventually they did and started competing with each other.

>Yandex predates Google.

Yandex - founded in 2000. Google - founded in 1998.

Predates for sure.

Yandex as a search engine was publicly opened in 1997 by a company called CompTek. In 2000 they split into a separate legal body.

Should we count early Page & Brin efforts then?

If they used same brand and domain name, then IMO we should. Did they?

For whatever reason, not many people speak English in Russia, especially outside of big cities. They have a completely different view of world affairs and the world situation from you, since the only information they can digest is from their own controlled/manipulated sources and most people have no way to detect any falsehoods - it's not like they could just read Reuters/NY Times.

I'm originally from a very small, insignificant country that also uses Cyrillic but people adapted to the early days of the internet just fine.

English was relatively widely taught and at least understood on some very basic level, and people adapted the Latin alphabet to type out words, there's even a "phonetic" standard for using the Latin alphabet to write Cyrillic.

Most of my friends from that era never even used the (poorly) localized early Windows/DOS, it was all the US version of everything.

So Facebook for example is still the thing, and very well localized, although there are (for whatever ungodly reason) "local" versions of sites like YouTube (although YouTube is also super popular).

Do the Greeks have the same issue?

No, the Greeks have the issue of having half the population of Moscow, which makes them even more of a niche market.

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