Google now surpasses Yandex in terms of monthly audience in Russia, while the Russian search giant is keeping its leadership in terms of daily audience, according to TNS.
During the month of April 2016, according TNS data cited by Russian business daily Vedomosti, 20.5 million people used Google at least once in Russia, whether on computers or mobile devices. The US company was slightly ahead of Yandex (20.4 million monthly users), and Mail.ru (19.3 million).
Yandex remained the leader in terms of daily audience accessing its services from all types of devices, with 12.3 million people using at least one of its services within a 24-hour period. The social network VK.com took second place with 12.1 million users, and Google finished in third place with 11 million users per day in average in April 2016.
TNS, which is viewed in Russia as a reference for web audience measurement, has published consolidated desktop and smartphone data for the first time.
Google’s traction is particularly strong among mobile users, with 16.35 million users accessing its services via apps or web mobile in April 2016 — compared to 13.73 million for Vkontakte and 13.38 million for Yandex. Yandex remains, by far, the leader among those using PCs and notebooks, with 54.35 million users in April 2016. Google services were used by just 43.66 million such users.
Google vs. Yandex: A 15-year battle
Yandex, whose technology was created in the mid-1990s – several years before Google, – established itself as the leader of the online search market in Russia around 2002, leaving its competitors in the dust.
The US giant had launched its Russian-language search engine in 2001, but it opened its first office in Russia and introduced Russian-language morphology-based search capabilities only in 2006. Like most US web giants, Google did not or could not consider Russia as a priority market in its early international development plans. This left Yandex some time to firmly establish itself on the local market.
In the mid-2000s, Google began to assert itself more aggressively in Russia. Yandex, whose market share fell to 51% in 2008, stroke back with radical technological and strategic changes, and progressively regained positions.
