Russia’s top Internet search portal Yandex, which outstrips Google on the domestic market with a 62% market share, has been ranked fifth on a global list of Internet search properties prepared by the US research firm comScore, reported news agency RIA Novosti.
In September, 2011, Yandex served over 3 billion search requests. This indicator shows significant improvement on its positions on the global Internet search market over the past two years. Yandex outpaced NHN Corporation, the owner of leading South Korean web crawler Naver, eBay, the US online marketplace, and even Facebook.
The Russian search giant Yandex is surpassed by world leader Google, with over 118 billion search queries in September 2011, China’s Baidu, with more than 11 billion queries, Yahoo with about 11 billion queries and Microsoft’s website network which totaled about 5 billion queries for the period in question.
Russia is one of three markets in the world where local players successfully resist Google’s domination. Two other markets are China, with national search provider Baidu and South Korea, which favors the Naver search engine.
Outside Russia, Yandex has significant market share on the Kazakh, Ukrainian, and Belorussian markets, where it has approximately 25%, 29%, and 39% of the local markets, respectively.
In 2010, Yandex launched an English-language version, earning praise for the accuracy of its results, according to US business magazine Fast Company. In February of this year, the magazine ranked Yandex on its 2010 list of the world’s 50 most innovative companies.
In September of this year, Yandex launched a Turkish version of its search engine in a bid to challenge Google’s domination on the local search market.