The leading Russian search engine Yandex, announced yesterday that its revenues had grown by 65% in quarter 3 compared with the previous year. With a turnover of 5.2 billion Rubles ($161.9 million Rubles) and a profit of 1.8 billion [...]]]> The leading Russian search engine Yandex, announced yesterday that its revenues had grown by 65% in quarter 3 compared with the previous year. With a turnover of 5.2 billion Rubles ($161.9 million Rubles) and a profit of 1.8 billion Rubles, Yandex exceeded stock market expectations.

CEO Arkady Volozh said, “Yandex delivered strong financial results and made significant progress across all areas of our business during the third quarter. We increased the pace of the number of new product and services launched compared to prior quarters, both on the user and advertiser fronts. We also launched services in Turkey, an important milestone in our company’s development as it is our first truly international market.” He continued, “We continue to see robust growth and usage patterns in our markets and we expect that our investments will position the company for sustained growth and profitability going forward.”

The company also recently invested $15 million in US search engine Blekko and opened operations in Turkey.

Yandex’s office release.

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Yandex has launched a new approach to its search engine results pages. Following experiments which have been carried out during the summer, Yandex now has “Infinite Scrolling” search results pages.

The way this works is that there is an additional [...]]]> Yandex has launched a new approach to its search engine results pages. Following experiments which have been carried out during the summer, Yandex now has “Infinite Scrolling” search results pages.

The way this works is that there is an additional button under the search results called “10 More Results”. On the graphic below this is the button which shows top left beginning with what looks like a capital “E”.

Yandex 10 More Results Button For Its Infinite Scroll Results Pages

When you click the 10 More Results button, the next set of 10 results appear, but you don’t lose the original 10 you had found.

Yandex reports that a third of user browse through the results pages at least once a week, 10% scan up to ten pages and 20% return to the previous page. These figures conflict with the accepted view that people “Only look at the first 10 results”.

With the new approach, users can get as many results as they want on one page. They can also refine their query at any time since the search box is visible at all times even when scrolling down.

The Persistent Yandex Search Box On Its Infinite Scrolling Search Results Pages

Google already uses the infinite scroll approach for images and has been testing implement infinite scroll results for web results. Yandex has beaten Google to the gun, but their infinite scroll still requires a click to trigger it. Google’s approach with images is simply to have new images appear as you keep on scrolling down.

I’d like to bet Google will use that form of infinite scroll on its results and the buttonless approach will ultimately become the norm.

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2011 has been a big year for Russian search engine Yandex. In May it launched an IPO which saw it achieve over $1bn in investment and it has seen its share of the 2nd largest search market in Europe grow [...]]]> 2011 has been a big year for Russian search engine Yandex. In May it launched an IPO which saw it achieve over $1bn in investment and it has seen its share of the 2nd largest search market in Europe grow to 65% -  more, in fact,  if you consider its recent partnership with rival search engine Rambler.

I spoke to Preston Carey of Yandex, ahead of his participation in the International Search Summit New York on September 12th to ask him what we should expect next from Russia’s biggest search engine and how it can help international advertisers succeed in Russia.

Earlier this year Yandex had a very successful IPO, raising over $1 bn in investment. What should we expect to see from the search engine as a result of this?

The proceeds from the IPO will mainly be focused on investing in technology infrastructure that will help to support our dynamic growth.  The Russian internet market and audience are growing quite quickly and Yandex’s investments in our infrastructure will continue to keep us as the leader in the market.

Yandex has recently agreed a deal with local rival search engine Rambler to power its search results. How will the deal benefit advertisers and users?

The recent partnership with Rambler will allow Rambler’s customer to easily expand their reach and efficiency in the market by making it simple and convenient to also place their ads on Yandex.  This partnership makes it simple for Rambler’s existing customers to expand their reach without needing to manage two separate sets of campaigns on each advertising source.  Users will benefit from the increased number of advertisers in the market which will bring more relevant and targeted ads to the users.

The agreement seems to confirm Yandex’s claims that it is focused on growing in its domestic market, rather than expanding into new ones. Should we expect to see much of Yandex outside of Russia in the coming months/years?

The domestic Russian market is obviously an incredible strength for Yandex and Russia is growing and expanding in exciting ways right now.  We spend a lot of our time and energy ensuring that we offer our users and our advertisers the best possible services in the Russian market.  That being said, we always are looking for additional growth opportunities and think that there may be other markets beyond Russia that align well with Yandex’s strengths.  We will also continue to improve our ability to support and build our relationships with large international brands and advertising agencies outside of Russia.

Yandex has also recently released an English language version of its webmaster tools, Yandex.webmaster.   How should advertisers take advantage of this?

Yandex strongly recommends as a first step in thinking about SEO for Yandex that advertisers register and start using the Yandex webmaster tools.  These tools will tell you a wealth of important information not just about how Yandex is crawling your site but also about how search users are interacting with your site.  It will provide details on the top search queries that reach your site (both by impressions and clicks) and it will also tell you about how well your pages are doing in terms of click share, position, CTR, etc.  The tools have been warmly received by many of our top marketers who are using the feedback coming out of the tools to further improve their Russian sites.

What are the characteristics of the Russian market that make it appealing to international businesses?

The most appealing thing that I hear from our international customers is the current and future growth of the online advertising market.  This growth is being driven by the expansion of broadband throughout the country and is really bringing online the mass audience for the first time in Russia.  This expansion coupled with strong trends in consumers ecommerce and online shopping behavior make for very exciting times.  Looking out three to five years, Russia is going to be a major online market and the smart advertisers are getting in now to learn about what can be a complicated and challenging market for westerners.

If you could give just one tip to marketers targeting a Russian audience, what would it be?

The advice would be very similar to approaching any new foreign market – don’t assume that what works at home is going to work in Russia.  Find someone who knows the market who can help you learn and adopt your domestic practices.  That partner can be Yandex’s international account team who can help with translation and optimization or it can be an agency partner who has strong experience in Russia.

Finally, why attend the International Search Summit?

The International Search Summit brings together a unique group of experts in international search marketing whose combined perspective makes for an invaluable day of presentations and networking.

Preston will be speaking at the International Search Summit at SMX East on September 12th. Other speakers include Korean search engine Naver, social search engine Topsy and international search specialists Bill Hunt and Andy Atkins-Krüger.

Early Bird Rates are available until August 20th and passes for the Summit can be bought independently or in combination with SMX East passes.

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Yandex has translated its Webmaster service into English. The service, originally made for the Russian-speaking website owners, can now be used by anyone who owns a website and speaks English.

Yandex Webmaster tools informs website owners about which of their pages [...]]]> Yandex has translated its Webmaster service into English. The service, originally made for the Russian-speaking website owners, can now be used by anyone who owns a website and speaks English.

Yandex Webmaster tools informs website owners about which of their pages have been indexed by Yandex, what search words were used by their visitors and where the traffic to their websites comes from. The service also alerts the users about Malware detected on any of their web pages.

To have full access to all Yandex.Webmaster’s features, users need to register and confirm their ownership rights. No registration is required for submitting a website to the index.

The URL should be webmaster.yandex.ru (http://webmaster.yandex.com as pointed out below) but when you search Google then you find that Google shows results in English, however when I go in, the page is in Russian but the Cached version on Google shows English – I get in Russian, maybe because I come from Iceland?

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Russian search engine Yandex isn’t resting on its laurels following its successful IPO last month but continuing to consolidate its leading position in the Russian market through a collaboration with fellow Russian engine Rambler.

From 23rd June, Rambler will be using [...]]]> Russian search engine Yandex isn’t resting on its laurels following its successful IPO last month but continuing to consolidate its leading position in the Russian market through a collaboration with fellow Russian engine Rambler.

From 23rd June, Rambler will be using Yandex to power its search results,  as well as joining the Yandex.Direct ad network, however it will also continue to show ads placed on Begun, an alternative advertising platform in which it has controlling interest. The partnership will enable advertisers to increase their reach and appear in front of new customers.

Figures from LiveInternet.ru in March 2011 show that Rambler’s search share in Russia had dropped to just 2%, compared with the 26% it held in 2005. This is in contrast to Google, who only had 5% share in 2005, which has now increased to 22%. The Silicon Valley search giant still has a long way to go to make any impact on Yandex, which has 65%.

Yandex has also been gaining ground in other Russian speaking markets, namely Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. It is yet to overtake Google for the majority share in those countries, but its understanding and handling of the complex Russian language makes it an increasingly popular choice in Russian-speaking markets.

Yandex intends to continue to focus solely on Russian markets, and there are no plans for the engine to roll out into other markets. As Co-Founder Arkady Volozh said, “We still have huge room to grow. The Russian advertising market is projected to triple in the next several years”.  The partnership with Rambler is further proof of Yandex’s intention to dominate its home market – and Google now has an even greater fight on its hands to increase its presence -and revenue – in Russia.

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While everybody knows about “Russian Google” Yandex, today I want to talk about another big player in Russian online advertisement market – Mail.ru.

Mail.Ru Group Limited is one of the biggest Internet company (more than 1800 employees) in the Russian [...]]]> While everybody knows about “Russian Google” Yandex, today I want to talk about another big player in Russian online advertisement market – Mail.ru.

Mail.Ru Group Limited is one of the biggest Internet company (more than 1800 employees) in the Russian speaking part of the World Wide Web and seventh largest Internet business in the world. Company reports to have more than 11.6 million visitors per day and their sites reach approximately 80% of Russian Internet users.  In the end of 2010 Mail.Ru went public and currently is one of few Russian Internet companies listed on London Stock Exchange and since then their stock grew from $27.70 to current $33 (check MAIL.LI)

Mail.Ru Group includes the most popular free email service and two biggest instant messaging services: Mail.Ru Agent (more than 80 million of email accounts) and ICQ. Company also operates two leading social networks MyWorld @Mail.Ru and Odnoklassniki.ru (similar to Classmates.com )  plus has around 33% of shares of VKontakte, Russian analogue of Facebook. It also operates HeadHunter, a leading online recruitment service in Russia.

Mai.Ru is also developing several popular e-commerce projects that includes electronic payment system  Money@Mail.Ru , Travel@Mail.Ru , Goods@Mail.Ru and leading developer of online games for social networks.

It is worth to mention another company’s project – Russian Code Cup, the largest annual programming  completion in Russia that help to identify and provide career support for talented Russian programmers and increase awareness about innovative level of Russian IT and Internet  industry.  All competitors need to accomplish unique programming tasks and those who score the highest marks receive large cash prizes up to $10,000 for the first place. This support for new local promising programming talents gives additional push to the growth of Internet industry in Russia.

Placing advertisement on Mail.Ru

If you want to use Mail.Ru advertisement services please keep in mind that you will be dealing mostly with banner advertisement. These banners can be created by Mail.ru design team or made in-house, but they must to comply with specific requirements.

Here are the major technical requirements for banner ads:

• All banners must be in GIF, JPEG or SWF formats (Flash version 8.0) formats.
• The size of the banner image must be less than 35Kb.
• There are special requirements  for expandable Flash banners. The total size of these banners must be less than 250Kb.
• All banners should not contain elements that remind interface, irritate vision with flashing images and texts, or contain pornographic images.
• While advertisement of alcohol and tobacco products is permitted, there are special requirements on these ads that need to be verified with Mail.Ru’s  legal department.

Mail.Ru provides special discounts (up to 35%) for placing large volumes of advertisement.

There are special seasonal coefficients applied to the basic price list depending on the month of the year. The lowest is 0.8 for January, 0.9 for February and July-August, 1.0  for March-June, 1.3 for September- October, and the highest is  1.5 for November-December.

Typical costs for placing banner ads on Mail.Ru:

• 300×300 for ad placement on the main page with CPM $2.50 (will be increased to $5.00 in June 2011)
• 240×400 for ad placement on the email service internal pages  with CPM $2.00 (will be increased by 20% in June 2011)
• 200×300 for ad placement on the My World@Mail.ru pages with CPM $1.50

Typical costs for placing banner ads on Odnoklassniki.ru  social network (will be increased by 30-40% in June 2011):

• 200×300 for ad placement on the main page with CPM $1.50
• 728×90 for ad placement on the email service internal pages  with CPM $1.50
• 240×400 for ad placement on the My World@Mail.ru pages with CPM $1.50

In March 2011 company launched the program of video advertisement for their clients. Advertisers can place ads in In-Page format on all pages of Mail.Ru portal plus in the social network Odnoklassniki.

Here are the major requirements for video ads:

• The size of the banner image must be less than 35 Kb.
• Video clips must be in FLV format with live streaming size less than 1 Mb
• Video banner must contain Start, Stop and Mute buttons.

You can also place text and image ads on mobile version of Mail.Ru (m.mail.ru). The main technical requirements include:

• Text ad must contain no more than 32 characters.
• Banner image format – GIF only.
• Banner ad size – 220×50, less than 5 Kb
• Banners may be animated, but they are not supported in Opera Mini, most popular mobile browser in Russia.

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I just came [...]]]>

I just came back from Moscow after spending three days at the RIF+KIB 2011, the biggest Internet conference in Russia. I decided to attend this event to use this opportunity to promote SEMPO in Russia, and learn for myself about SEO/SEM business practices in this rapidly growing market where Yandex, not Google, is a dominant search engine, and what difference does it make. It was a very interesting experience, I have learned a lot about the Russian Internet industry (called RuNet in Russia) and particularly about online marketing business there, and I met a lot of great people there. About 7,000 people attended this three-day event, mostly young, in their 20’s and 30’s, very ambitious and eager to learn about the Internet industry.

The program of the conference consisted of two main groups of events. The main program was formed by organizing committee and it was broken into sections covering a lot of topics: Online Marketing, Web Development, Social Media, education, start-up businesses, legal aspects, government regulation, etc.

The second group (Program 2.0) was formed by participant’s voting for presentations submitted prior the conference. I submitted three proposals to speak, with topics like International SEO, Internet Marketing Education and SEMPO itself and at the end none of them were accepted. Presentations about education was getting quite a lot of interest and votes, but at the end it was the only presentation in this section and was rejected based on the rules. International SEO presentation (which was the only one) was taken into consideration for Regional Promotion section along with several other speakers, and this section was very popular with participants who voted for it. I was watching the voting very closely, and I was confident it would be one of the most popular among attendees. Unfortunately, when I came to the conference, somehow, in a very mysterious way, the whole section with 8 speakers from other regions of Russia wasn’t included in Program 2.0 of this event.

Later I had some private talks with people close to organizing committee, and they told me that the conference program was finalized the night before opening, organizers had problems to get speakers for several sections. If it was a case, why any of my proposals were weren’t included along with many other proposals from regional companies – I don’t understand.  I was also in many ways frustrated with how difficult it was to communicate with organizers of this event. While all contact info was posted on the website, nobody replied to my emails, and it was almost impossible to get any answers over the phone, especially if you call from Canada.

During the conference I had talks with representatives of almost all major players in Russia like RAEK (Russian Association of Electronic Communications), Yandex (most popular website and search engine in Russia), Begun, Ashmanov & Partners, RBS Corp., RU Center, 1C-Bitrix just to name few. We were talking about the growth of Internet industry in Russia and problems it’s experiencing right now, differences in practices and approaches.

I had a short conversation with Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex who looked just like an average person and was very polite. When I asked him if Yandex’s global indexing means the beginning of competition with Google, his reply was that Yandex mostly focused on indexing of Cyrillic content on the web.  I also met with Andrey Sebrant, Director of Product Marketing, and Eugene Lomize, Advertising Technology Director, whom I met last year in Seattle when he was a speaker at International Search Summit conferences sharing information about Internet industry in Russia and Yandex growth in particular. I spoke about SEMPO and its role, and both expressed some interest to support SEMPO in Russia. We still need to discuss the form of this support.

Interesting diagram of Russian Digital Marketing Eco-System was presented by Boris Omelnitskiy, CEO of Begun, one of the Top 5 Internet advertising platforms in Russia. It shows key sectors and all major players on this fast growing market. Begun’s Marketing Manager Elena Klimanskaya was very kind to spend some time with me and providing some valuable information about the landscape of Internet marketing in Russia, explaining me how it works in the market where Google has just around 20% of search market share, Facebook has only 5 million users to this date, and number of Twitter’s users is slowly growing as well.

I had a great talk with Ksenia Ryzhkova, Director of Marketing and PR for Ashmanov & Partners, the leader in the field of Internet Marketing in Russia. This company leads the way through organizing conferences, hosting monthly workshops, publishing books about SEO and providing training to new and experienced specialists. Company has experienced big growth in business in last three years that were troubled years for many other businesses in Russia. Ashmanov started to develop its own sophisticated SE tools like this Search Engine Analyzer .

It was very unusual to see so many government officials speaking at such an event. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has sent a greeting message to the participants via Twitter, Minister of Communications and Information Technologies Mr. Igor Shchegolev took a tour around the expo floor and later participated in round table discussions along with his deputy minister. Several presentation were covering topics like Government 2.0, new initiative to implement IT and online solutions for the federal and local governments that can offer information and government services to the general public over the web.

It was also interesting to learn that Russian government has an interest in developing a new national Internet search engine independently from Yandex. When and how this ambitious project will be accomplished – nobody knows, but it would be interesting to see how this new SE will compete with Yandex and Google, how popular it will be with Russian Internet users.

Few takeaways from this conference:

• Russia is second largest Internet market in Europe (just behind Germany) with 57 million of Internet users and continue to experience a big growth, especially in the regions far from Moscow and St. Petersburg, in smaller cities. Approximately 40% of those users were using mobile devices to access Internet. In 2014 the RuNet audience expected to reach 80 million users, with 71% penetration rate.

• E-commerce is getting more and more popular among Russian shoppers as more people is getting access to Internet and credit cards. About $7.5B were spent online in 2010 with forecasted growth of 17% in 2011 (approximately $8.75B).

• Russian SEM companies are totally focused on Yandex, the leading search engine and most visited website. This search engine has its unique web search service based on a proprietary machine-learning method MatrixNet . Yandex has its own webmaster tips , but more info can be found in Yandex Recommendations for webmasters that are very similar to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (unfortunately, this document is available in Russian only). Yandex.Webmaster tool also looks pretty similar to Google’s, with pretty similar functionality. So all these things can be taken as an indication that if your website is optimized according to the Google’s rules, then it has pretty good chances to rank well in organic SERPs of Yandex as well (of course if the content is written in Russian).

• If you want to use PPC advertisement in Russia, Google AdWords could be one of the options, but Yandex.Direct has a clear advantage in this market as well. Be prepared for minimal spending budget that is around $700. You can set up ad campaigns on your own or use one of the certified Yandex ad agencies to help you with this.

• Banner advertisement is still a big topic in Russia. To me it sounds like a stone age, but this is the reality in Russia. All major ad networks like Yandex, VKontakte or Odnoklassniki offer banner advertisement in their networks, and apparently it works well for many advertisers.

• Few SEM companies from Moscow and St. Petersburg totally dominate the Russian market. They open regional offices in other major Russian cities and try to do most of the business through their reps there.

• Russian market looks very self-isolated at this moment. Almost all Russian online marketing agencies don’t do any business outside of the Russia and CIS countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia or Moldova. Possibly because of language barrier, lack of advertisers interested in foreign market, or because of lack of knowledge in latest search marketing techniques, they simply aren’t ready to do business the way it’s been done in North America and Europe.  Out of hundred presentations at this event none was about doing SEO/SEM internationally. This isolation of RuNet also could be a problem for any foreign SEM company that has plans to open office and try to do business in Russia.

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Yandex’s launch of Yandex.Maps in July of 2010 following its acquisition of GIS Technologies is now to be fully exploited through the addition of Geo-targeted ads which will appear in the maps, in Yandex’s business directory and more significantly [...]]]> Yandex’s launch of Yandex.Maps in July of 2010 following its acquisition of GIS Technologies is now to be fully exploited through the addition of Geo-targeted ads which will appear in the maps, in Yandex’s business directory and more significantly within the search results themselves giving local businesses the opportunity to obtain greater “Stand Out”.

Business owners can opt for a premium placement product which means that the company’s location is highlighted on the associated maps and access to the contact details for the firm needs a simple click. This is a new market for Yandex and the company says it is aiming to provide the ideal solution for Russian small businesses who don’t actually have any kind of online presence — such as bakeries, hairdressing salons or repair shops.

Head of the Advertising Technologies Group at Yandex, Eugene Lomize, a regular speaker at the International Search Summit, points out that, “Geo-targeted ads have one important feature that they share with the ads served by Yandex.Direct: they are triggered by users’ search queries.” Advertisers can obtain the advertising solution through around 20 companies in Russia — as well of course as from WebCertain.

The following screenshots demonstrate how the service works and its presentation. Of course, this is very similar to Google Maps and critics will say that this is a copy. However, Yandex have achieved a very attractive presentation of the service. The first screenshot shows a search for “Car Services” near “Golovinskoe Shosse” in Moscow with the company “Наука-авто” or “Nauka-Avto” highlighted.

At the top of screen are two search boxes, on the left is the “What” and on the right is the “Where”. The number one listed Nauka-Avto is the organisation paying a premium to have its location on the map highlighted and also its listing to appear at the top of the listings shown on the left hand side.

The next screenshot shows a search for banks in the “What” search box on the left and “Vatutina Street” is showing in the “Where” search box on the right — a street in Novosibirsk. The results are showing “БИНБанк” or “BINBank” as the number one on the map and on the right hand side listing.

The final screenshot shows a search for coffee houses near Nevsky Prospekt in Saint Petersburg (a street of which I have fond memories ) and the firm Chainaya Lozhka or “Чайная ложка” is highlighted.

When comparing these with Google Places or Maps, the key differences are in the presentation of the maps and the fact that Google notes that highlighted listings are “Ads” which is not shown on the Yandex versions — something I’d like to see them change! Google also lists and has more reviews to show. In fairness to Yandex, they are not so dependent on listings being provided by partners in Russia.

Just like Google Boost, the ads are charged at a fixed price for a fixed period of time. Advertisers from Moscow would 9,450 Rubles or $317 to list their business for 3 months and in Samara it would cost roughly one third of that for the same package but targeting a smaller population.

For international businesses this new approach offers the opportunity of establishing a small new business in Russia — perhaps in one of the smaller cities — and undertaking some test marketing of a concept before rolling it out to the whole of Russia.

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Yandex has just released its financial figures for 2010 and the number one Russian search engine managed to achieve a whopping 43% growth in revenue taking them to $410 million — 88% of this increased revenue related to pure search [...]]]> Yandex has just released its financial figures for 2010 and the number one Russian search engine managed to achieve a whopping 43% growth in revenue taking them to $410 million — 88% of this increased revenue related to pure search ads as opposed to the other advertising products offered by the company. And search ads actually grew faster at 45% growth than the other advertising types.

Yandex points out that the Russian Association of Communication Agencies have reported growth for the first three quarters of 2010 of 14% overall and 37% for online — which simply goes to show that Yandex’s growth both partially reflects the development of search advertising within the market, and at the same time demonstrates growth above the average. CEO Arkady Volzh reinforces this point, “The highlight of 2010, as we see it, is that by constantly improving our product quality we managed to increase our share of the search market. The considerable revenue increase we report this year reflects two important trends — a post-crisis revival of the small and medium-sized businesses and a shift in advertising expenditures from other channels towards online advertising.”

The Russian internet statistics organisation LiveInternet says that Yandex’s share of the Russian search market grew by 5.2% to 64.1% in December 2010, with its share in the Ukrainian market going up 6.2% to 27% and its market share in Kazakhstan increasing 4.6 % to 24.4%. ComScore also says that Yandex’s monthly audience grew 64% from November 2009 to November 2010, peaking at over 54 million users in November 2010. During the past year, Yandex added localized services for users in Belarus (yandex.by), released a search engine customised for Ukrainian users, and launched an international search service (yandex.com) alongside a number of vertical market targeted services including Yandex.Realty, Yandex.Jobs, Yandex.Music and Yandex.Amenities. Yandex now has 180,000 advertisers which was itself 40% ahead of the figure in the previous year.

The result is a fabulous one for Yandex, and a blow for Google, and means that Yandex is continuing to maintain and to build on its share of the Russian-language market and they are beginning to show growth in the historically closely-related Slavic eastern Europe.

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Leading Russian search engine Yandex, has introduced a new method of predicting user intent in order to improve the quality of its results and thereby improve relevancy. The Yandex team advise that the system, known as “Spectrum” is based [...]]]> Leading Russian search engine Yandex, has introduced a new method of predicting user intent in order to improve the quality of its results and thereby improve relevancy. The Yandex team advise that the system, known as “Spectrum” is based on analysing user queries statistically, categorising them — and then making sure that a range or “Spectrum” of possible answers to the query is delivered in the search results pages based on popularity.

The issue with keywords which have can have multiple user intentions behind them is that it is too easy for a search engine’s results to be dominated by the most popular single meaning associated with a particular keyword. Yandex says that around 20% of user queries on their engine are ambiguous. A query for “Apple” might mean the fruit or the company — likewise someone searching for “pizza”, might be searching for a restaurant or a recipe.

The new search technology has been developed by the Yandex team and focuses on allowing the search engine to return a whole “spectrum” of results matching a variety of user intents based on the frequency of user searches.

Yandex is attempting to regularly analyse user searches and to connect the most popular meanings behind the searches, based on the subsequent search paths of the users, then creating categories which become associated with the particular keyword. This meaning-based categorisation means the search engine “knows” what the range of most likely meaning options is and can cover the broader range within the immediate results reducing the amount of time the user needs to go hunting for the answers.

Each ambiguous keyword is analysed for objects such as personal names, films, books or cars. Each object is then classified into one or more categories. So, in the search query [panadol dosage] the medicine’s brand name ‘Panadol’ will be categorized as ‘medicine’, while the search term [casablanca] will be classified both into the ‘city’ and the ‘film’ categories. Currently, Spectrum uses about 60 (and counting) pre-defined categories.

For each category there is a range of search intents, the intentions with which the users look for something. So, the ‘product’ category will have search intents such as buy something or read customer reviews. The search intents for this category, consequently, will include ‘buy’, ‘reviews’ and ‘feedback’. A category may have from two or three search intents to dozens of them.

The query analysis undertaken by Yandex is fully automated, the company says. “Using the power of over a thousand processor cores, Spectrum analyses over 5 billion search queries on each analysis. The resulting database is kept up to date by repeating each analysis several times each week.”

Effectively, Yandex is using the historical experience of many searchers and searches to “guess” more accurately what the popular range of non-visible intentions is. In addition to search log statistics, Spectrum also uses information from reference sources and encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia. This helps the search engine to recognize new objects, learn about new meanings that do not fit any of the existing categories and add new categories.

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China’s leading search engine Baidu will be joining Russian market leader Yandex and Middle Eastern search engine Ayna at the International Search Summit London on 28th October.

Senior Product Manager for Baidu, Min Cui, will be speaking on the Chinese [...]]]> China’s leading search engine Baidu will be joining Russian market leader Yandex and Middle Eastern search engine Ayna at the International Search Summit London on 28th October.

Senior Product Manager for Baidu, Min Cui, will be speaking on the Chinese search market and giving delegates insights into how marketers can use Baidu to reach a Chinese audience.

Min Cui manages the Product team that looks after the Phoenix Nest Platform, Baidu’s own ad management and ad serving system.

China, Russia and The Middle East are 3 of the fastest growing global internet markets, and a recent study has shown that web users in China and The Middle East spend more time online than in any other markets.

All three search engines will be presenting at the event, as well as participating in a Q & A session.

Also speaking at the Summit is Inway Ni, the VP of 4399.com – the largest gaming site in China. He will be discussing how he has achieved such success with his website and giving tips and advice on effective SEO and SEM strategies for the Chinese market.

The Summit will also feature case studies from global organisations Autodesk and The British Council, and sessions from leading global search experts including Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Marty Weintraub and Massimo Burgio.

Tickets for the Summit are still available.

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For any organisation targeting a Russian audience, knowing and understanding Yandex is key to success in the country. The homegrown search engine is the clear market leader in Russia, and is showing little sign of relinquishing any of this share [...]]]> For any organisation targeting a Russian audience, knowing and understanding Yandex is key to success in the country. The homegrown search engine is the clear market leader in Russia, and is showing little sign of relinquishing any of this share to Google, or any other competitors.

Eugene Lomize, Head of Advertising Technologies at Yandex will be speaking at the International Search Summit in both Seattle and London, where he will talk about the online market in Russia, as well as how organisations can use Yandex to get the most out of their campaigns.

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.

What was the reason behind Yandex’s decision to offer users results in English, and the Latin-alphabet? How have users responded to this?

Yandex has been indexing foreign websites and adding global content to its search results for two years already. Web users in Russia look for, first and foremost, locally relevant information in their own language, with foreign websites being only an extension to the local search results. However, it may happen that the user wants to receive an answer specifically from a foreign website. This is the main reason why we offer our users an opportunity to limit their search specifically to foreign websites. We’ve been only experimenting and obtaining feedback so far. What we can say with certainty, though, is that now we can return an answer to each of the 15 million search queries in languages based on the Latin alphabet (12-15% of all queries on Yandex) that we receive every day and we do it well.

What are the major changes that have taken place in the Russian online market in the past year? And how have they impacted on advertisers and search marketers targeting the region?

In the past year, the  online market in Russia kept growing and absorbing budgets from offline advertising. Contextual advertising kept growing faster than the market for banner ads due to the influx of numerous clients with yearly budgets varying from a couple hundred dollars to millions. Having historically been the market mostly for hundreds of thousands of small players, search advertising has now been boosted by the emergence of some really large accounts, e.g. niche (auto, finance etc) brands, FMCG international companies and mass e-commerce sites.

What is Yandex doing to keep up with these changes?

We are constantly improving our products to suit the market demand. Since search advertising attracts clients with very different backgrounds, demands, budgets and levels of competence, we have to provide them with various tools to meet their requirements. We launched a very simple and very intuitive interface (with a lot of intelligence inside the system) for the industry newbies (those with very little or no experience in search advertising). In addition, we keep developing and upgrading our advanced campaign management tools for our largest clients who run campaigns with hundreds of thousands of keywords. As a part of this, we released an API for integration with the search аds management systems like Omniture.

If you could give one tip to anyone targeting the Russian market through search, what would it be?

Keep in mind that Russia is different. It’s a special country where a local search engine, Yandex, serves 64% of all search queries and Google has to deal with only 21%. It also has a specific language and culture – and this is something that does matter. Going the easy way and giving literal translation to your keywords and ads to ‘localise’ them does not work. One has to re-develop every ad to make it sound Russian, and re-define keywords according to the local cultural habits. That’s why it’s so important that advertising campaigns in Russia are designed and supported by the locals, advertising professionals whose mother tongue is Russian.

And finally, why should people attend the International Search Summit?

To understand what it takes to make their search marketing truly international. The online world is global and has no borders, but there are so many nuances that are essential for success.

Details on how to book for Seattle and London, as well as full event agendas are available at www.internationalsearchsummit.com.

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Russian market-leading search engine Yandex, has opened up access to a Latin-alphabet index it has been compiling for the last two years with most content in the English language. A statement from Yandex explained that the principle objective is [...]]]> Russian market-leading search engine Yandex, has opened up access to a Latin-alphabet index it has been compiling for the last two years with most content in the English language. A statement from Yandex explained that the principle objective is to provide Latin-alphabet results to Russian searchers, “web users in Russia look for, first and foremost, locally relevant information in their own language, with foreign websites being only an extension to local search results. However, it may happen so that the user wants to receive an answer specifically from a foreign website. Yandex can now satisfy this need in only one click.”

According to the Yandex statement they will index content in whatever Latin-alphabet language is searched for by Russian users who search roughly 12-15% of the time using Latin-alphabet searches. They claim they are not indexing the whole web or going into direct global competition with Google. However, as English will definitely lead the way on this – it does mean they will rub up more directly agains their number one Russian threat – Google.ru.

Google has always had the advantage of giving Russian searchers the option of finding content in languages other than Russian which has made them attractive for the more internationally-minded Russians or those seeking technology. Yandex now provides the option to search and find content in Russian or English – and if the best results are in English these can easily be translated back into Russian with Russian results being found at the same time.

At the same time, they’ve also created a Latin-alphabet version of the normally Russian-alphabet search engine at Yandex.com – which means that as of today they have entered the market place in competition with Google as well as giving English-speaking users more awareness of their technology. The battle for pre-eminence in Russia has been hot for years with Yandex maintaining its position at the top of market though with occasional strong approaches – so this can be seen as an aggressive defensive move.

Currently, they have four billion pages indexed in Latin-alphabet languages.

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...Petersburg, other russian 30% other countries 12% Average price for click: high tech $ 0,31 Consulting $ 0,62 Tourism $ 0,34 B2B $ 0,66 (gowing down along with finance, and education) Yandex offers an English interface but not the best it could be presenting russian where English is not available Yandex offers premium and guaranteed positions - the most intensive way of promoting your site on Yandex search - then there is rotation.

A fascinating acquisition has taken place in Russia where Google, which has not traditionally performed well in the Russian search engine market, has paid one of its competitors $50 million for their share of the Begun contextual advertising system. [...]]]> A fascinating acquisition has taken place in Russia where Google, which has not traditionally performed well in the Russian search engine market, has paid one of its competitors $50 million for their share of the Begun contextual advertising system. The total acquisition value of Begun was $140 million – but a signficant slice of that will be paid to Rambler’s partner in Begun – Bannatyne Ltd.

Meanwhile, Rambler, the original control owner of Begun, continues to compete with Google as a search engine which is now richer than it was before with having, according to its own press release, a net cash position of $100 million to pursue “further investments and acquisitions in line with Rambler’s stated strategy.” Begun is known to have typically paid lower prices to publishers and cost less for advertisers – no doubt the Google involvement will change that in some way.

The English press release is available here.

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Both WebProNews and Bloomburg are reporting on the comments made by Vladimir Dolgov, Head of Google Russia, that online ad sales will jump fivefold in Russia to reach $1 billion in 2010.

In 2010, Google believes its operations in [...]]]> Both WebProNews and Bloomburg are reporting on the comments made by Vladimir Dolgov, Head of Google Russia, that online ad sales will jump fivefold in Russia to reach $1 billion in 2010.

In 2010, Google believes its operations in Russia could be tapping a billion dollar Internet advertising market. 2007 saw Russia grow to a $200 million bonanza in online ads. Two years from now may make that a fleeting, unprofitable memory.

Vladmir Dolgov said online advertising as a whole has caught fire in Russia, with 75,000 companies out of three million registered firms indulging in online ads. Online ad sales reached $200 million last year and have more than doubled every year for the past four, Dolgov said.

Russia will have almost 40 million personal computers this year, according to a Communications Ministry forecast, up from more than 31 million last year. The number of Internet users in the country of 142 million people will rise to 46 million, up from 35 million in 2007.

Yandex still dominates the market in Russia but Google appears to have moved Russia to a higher priority lately as they fight for users.

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Techcrunch reports of Ex-Yahoo SVP and General Manager of Search Vish Makhijani becoming Yandex CEO have been denied by the company in a press release today.

Vish Makhijani has indeed joined Yandex but in the position of President and CEO [...]]]> Techcrunch reports of Ex-Yahoo SVP and General Manager of Search Vish Makhijani becoming Yandex CEO have been denied by the company in a press release today.

Vish Makhijani has indeed joined Yandex but in the position of President and CEO of their new US technology and business development facility, “Yandex Labs” based in Silicone Valley, US. Arkady Volozh, a popular figure in the Russian new media scene will continue in his post as head of the company.

“We did not hesitate to go the extra mile to find this rare talent,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex, the parent company. “We are excited to add a leading technology and business veteran in Silicon Valley to the Yandex team. Vish and his group at Yandex Labs will help to develop and improve Yandex’s core technology capabilities including the quality of algorithmic search for the Russian audience.”

Source: Yandex News

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev joined calls for the country to be assigned an Internet domain name in the Cyrillic script, reports the Moscow Times on Wednesday as part of a Kremlin drive to promote Russian as a global language.

He [...]]]> Russian President Dmitry Medvedev joined calls for the country to be assigned an Internet domain name in the Cyrillic script, reports the Moscow Times on Wednesday as part of a Kremlin drive to promote Russian as a global language.

He said 300 million people worldwide used Russian media and that a Cyrillic domain name would be a key part of raising the importance of the language, a task he said was his personal priority as president.

“We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name — it is a pretty serious thing. It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic. … And I think we have a rather high chance of achieving such a decision.”

Medvedev is certainly the most tech-savvy head of state Russia has seen, he has publicly used his mobilephone to connect to the Internet and says he surfs inline every morning for news.

The Russians wish to have the first true IDN extension on the Internet, .RF (.рф). Unlike other IDN domains currently available, where the extension itself remains in Latin characters, full IDN domains will be entirely in the non-Latin character sets. The viability of these domains is beng discussed at the ICANN meeting later this month in Paris.

While the application of presidential influence may well help the Russian cause, ICANN still has issues with the continued use of the .SU (Soviet Union) extension. After many requests to the operators to “to freeze new registrations”, this extension is still being actively promoted. In fact their last reaction to ICANN’s demands was to slash prices by 50%. This move quadrupled the number of SU users from 11′000 to more than 45′000, making it even more of a headache to decommission. However, it is increasingly looking like a compromise will be in the form of an exchange between .SU and .RF (.рф). With that in mind registration of .SU would seem a smart move at the moment, as users domain names would be transferred, without further application.

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