The Russians are coming to Google's territory - Feb. 10, 2009: "Having conquered search in Russia, Yandex is setting its sights on the U.S. The Moscow-based company is opening Yandex Labs not far from Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Volozh says he'll staff the office with 20 or so engineers to index Web pages for a Russian audience and keep abreast of technology developments that bubble up in Silicon Valley.
Volozh certainly will be going after some of the same tech superstars Google recruits, but some wonder whether Yandex has grander ambitions, including a play for some of Google's U.S. market share. One possibility: grabbing part of the growing market for image searches.
Volozh denies that he's chasing Google. In fact, Yandex, which got its start in the late 1980s, long before Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had even met, arguably has the superior search technology. Yandex's search algorithm is rooted in the highly inflected and very peculiar Russian language. Words can take on some 20 different endings to indicate their relationship to one another, and "while this makes the language precise," says MIT linguistics professor David Pesetsky, "it makes search extremely difficult." Google fetches the exact word combination you enter into the search bar, leaving out the slightly different forms that mean similar things.
Yandex has found a way to catch them all.
As a result, Yandex controls 56% of the search market in Russia (compared with Google's 23%), boasts an impressive two-thirds of all revenue from so-called search ads, and draws more than three billion hits a month. Last month Firefox dropped Google as its default search engine in Russia in favor of Yandex, putting Yandex on track to conquer still more of the market" 'via Blog this'
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