The Russian government is to get its own search engine. Rostelecom, the national telecom operator, is planning to launch the new service, called Sputnik, within a matter of weeks, the Russian business daily reported last week.
Sputnik first came to the public’s attention in October of last year, when it became clear that Rostelecom was actively trying to attract developers from Yandex, Mail.ru Group, Google and other major internet companies to work on the project.
While top developers do not come cheap, Alexander Basov, Rostelecom’s vice-president and head of the Sputnik project, pointed out that spending on the service will work out as less than the estimated value of Russian startup Get Taxi ($42 million), which he seems to think guarantees value for money, Vedomosti writes.
The service is expected to be made the default search engine in all state establishments, allowing it to quickly gain a significant market share.
The idea of a state search engine is not a new one. After the 2008 war in Georgia Ilya Ponomarev, an deputy in the National Parliament, told Vedomosti that information in leading news-search engines during the war differed from the state’s official account of the conflict. At this point the government realised the importance of search engines as a media resource and discussions began regarding the creation of a state-sponsored news aggregator.
The idea appeared again in 2010, but officials were perhaps put off by the $100 million estimated cost of creating a viable service, Vedomosti writes.
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.
Rostelecom’s announcement comes in the same week that President Putin described the internet as a special project of the CIA, and claimed that Yandex, which has more than 50% of the search market in Russia (compared to Google’s 26.6%) was “pressured” into having so many Americans and so many Europeans in their governing bodies.
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.
