Yes David, it’s good to have some new blood in the SE arena. Although the Russian search market is much more diverse than the UK/US/EU where Google dominates.

I wonder if Google like the new name? It has got some slight similarities to their brand Maybe I’m just too used to Google now!

>Partnering with Yandex for contextual ads also seems to be a great move.

Yes Google had that contract previously for Adwords but lost it late last year to Yandex. I don’t think Mail.ru will launch a contextual advertising platform but you never know. Begun’s system isn’t great so these other players could develop a tool to take network share away from them. One thing we’re not short of in Russia is programmers, we just seem to lack a bit of thinking on the usability side.

@Daniel

Yandex is *a lot* better than Begun but still not as easy to operate as the Adwords system. It seems Google has finally started tackling Russia now, with their recent purchase of Begun.

My guess would be that this purchase was more to do with their existing PPC contracts (i.e. Rambler), the customer base and the fact that Begun already have trained PPC support staff. I doubt it had much to do with the system itself. I expect Google has already started the process of moving everything across to Adwords and we’ll see Begun reduced to little more than a brand name (if that).