Russia’s national telecom operator Rostelecom is said to be working on a new search engine, CNews.ru reports. According to the publication’s sources in one of the Russian Internet companies, the national search portal has been christened Sputnik, with the corresponding domain already registered to Rostelecom’s subsidiary RTCOMM.
The Internet search market in Russia is dominated by Yandex, whose market share exceeds 60%, followed by Google, with approximately 25%, Mail.ru and Rambler (which dominated the market in the late 1990s).
Other players like Nigma.ru and Quitura.ru occupy relatively insignificant positions, in spite of their innovative approach.
The idea of a national, state-owned search engine has been around since 2009, when the existence of such a project was officially confirmed by the Minister of Communications Leonid Reiman. One year later, the Russian media reported that Rostelecom was hiring search engine specialists through a contractor company, presumably to work on the same project.
Last year, in an effort to stregthen its resources, Rostelecom purchased 74.99% of software developer KM Media for $5.75 million. The deal was made through the aforementioned RTCOMM. According to CNews.ru’s sources, the national search engine is now being developed by KM’s software engineers.
The launch date of the new search engine is unknown, though earlier it had been assumed to be March 2013. Governmental officials and representatives of Rostelecom, about 55% of which is owned by the Russian government through various entities, have declined to make any official comments on the matter so far.
Rostelecom has been at the forefront of an array of ambitious national IT projects. Among others, it has completed phase one of “Project 07,” a national cloud computing platform to be fully assembled by 2015, has led a medical e-record and e-card project, and has been connecting the regions to Russia’s e-government system.
