Firefox in Russia dumps Google for Yandex | Hacker News Reader

Firefox in Russia dumps Google for Yandex

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34 pointsepi0Bauqu19 comments

I know many people in Russia use Yandex quite a lot. I actually prefer Yandex to Google when I search for something in Russian. When I needs something in English I uses Google or Yahoo though. By the way Yandex has a lightweight home page which I actually like more than Google's: http://ya.ru.

There are only for links on this page: Upper left: make yandex a start page. Upper right: log into mail. Lower left: yandex.ru - heavy page with news and links to other services. Lower right: page designer company.

Their web email client is very lightweight and fast. It works faster than GMail on my 5 years old laptop which is nice. Other services are Ok, too.

Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia with more than 50% market share. It comes as a default search engine in Opera Mini and as a Speed Dial engine in Opera Desktop (which has about 20% market share in Russia).

And they also provide an 'optimized' version of Firefox 3 from their own site (toolbar, home page, and default search engine). When Firefox 3 was released this optimized version was heavily advertised on Russian internet and I know quite a few people who use that.

And no, I'm not a Yandex employee. I don't even live in Russia now. I just thought it might be a good idea to tell about because there not that many people who can read Russian

Their main homepage is also very useful for any Russian: local weather, TV program, ruble exchange rates etc.

"Ask Yandex" ad campaign was very successful: it made "to ask Yandex" in Russian mean the same as "to google" in English.

You might like http://yandex.ru/white.html

Yandex claims 10M unique IPs per month http://stat.yandex.ru/?Age=m&sort=3&SDay=0&FDay=...

Wow, they even link to the Google, Yahoo, ... search results in the footer of their own search results. Now that's open :)

This means that Google search is not as invincible abroad as it is the the US. I bet others will take a cue from Yandex and start search engines in other countries where Google (or Yahoo) is vulnerable (there are many from what I understand).

Why do so many Russians prefer Yandex over Google?

I would say that's because it was created with Russian internet (Runet) in mind.

For example when you enter something in the search box but forget to switch language on your keyboard it will detect it and provide right results with 'did you mean..'.

Also most websites on Runet just sucks. Pages are badly formed with lots of adds and without any SEO and Accessibility in mind. Sometimes when the page does actually contain a relevant information Google will give it a pour pagerank because of pour Signal vs. Noise ratio or because it's far from the top of the page. Poorly formed pages are hard for search engines to deal with but it seems Yandex does a better job (at least in Runet).

Yandex Maps has a Killer feature - you can measure distances with a simple tool. I have no idea why no one else does that!

Another important thing: Google is not faster (if not slower) than Yandex in Russia. That's something which I notice when I compared Yahoo! and Google while I lived there. Yahoo is a little bit slower than Google and when one makes a couple of searches (trying different words and phrases) it becomes really annoying. Yandex doesn't have this problem. Moreover it loaded faster when I used it outside of Moscow in regions with a slower internet connection (may be their datacenter was closer, I don't know).

And if you consider entering the url in the address bar it's even faster to type ya.ru vs. google.com. Of course it's not an issue now when I use browser hotkeys (type 'y search term' or 'g search term') but from my experience there are lots of people who still type the URL.

But the major key to success was a large ad campaign on TV when Runet was really young and small and no one heard about Google yet. I remember the time when I knew about two websites: Yandex and Mail.ru and those two still mean internet to my mom. Yandex became a synonym to 'search' alongside with Rambler. But unlike the later Yandex keeps innovating and it's still ahead of Google which surpassed Rambler last year.

I'm pleased to see that there are countries where Google does not own the market. Unfortunately it’s not the case in Europe where people use it 99% of the time even though there are great local search engines. Competition is great and it’s the only thing that drives the innovation.

It’s really funny when one person says to other 'Just google that' and the other opens Yandex and search but in Russia it’s the usual thing.

Is "Runet" a discrete internet, or is it just what Russian websites are seen to be a part of as a sort of internet language subculture?

It's basically just a colloquial term for all Russian-language websites. Just like the English-speaking Internet has various social news and blog sites that almost "glue" it together (Digg, Reddit, Y.C, Facebook, 4chan, etc), Runet has the appropriate equivalents (Livejournal, VKontakte, dirty.ru, 2ch.ru, etc)

I believe the Russian ISPs are highly interconnected, so Russian users get more bandwidth and less latency when they use local sites vs international.

For example when you enter something in the search box but forget to switch language on your keyboard it will detect it and provide right results with 'did you mean..'.

Google has this feature, too. But they were late. Everybody already used Yandex at the moment.

To put it simply: Yandex is just more relevant because it's a lot smarter than google is when it comes to dealing with the language. It makes a huge difference, for instance Google may treat a word as a simple verb, while Yandex will correctly recognize it as a hockey player's last name.

I think that even in US, the search engine that would ignore the rest of the world for the benefit of the average American (and with links to search Google, Yahoo! if the user wants) has this potential.

like baidu in china for example. I suspect that countries with different alphabet than latin have their own little googles which they use with more success than google.

no brainer really, Google is really struggling in Russia, and everyone uses Yandex. It all comes down to usability. In USA everyone uses Google, so having it embedded in Firefox adds to the experience. Now imagine if instead of Google you had Lycos as the default setting.

Like if you open IE and it has MSN Live Search as the default.

well Microsoft never really cared about user experience

By the way, Yandex used to promote Firefox on their home page for a year or even more probably (they promoted a build with yandex's toolbar, naturally)

In Soviet Russia, Yandex dumps you.

I was scrolling down the comments looking to see if someone was going to make this joke.

Glad to find it at the bottom where it belongs - Thanks HN.

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