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Comment by zzzcpan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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