Earlier this month, Russian search giant Yandex announced the launch of new, interactive search snippets called “Islands.” In contrast to previous launches of new features, this time the company decided not to try launching in its home market — Russia and Russian-speaking countries of the former Soviet Union — but to instead roll it out in Turkey first.
Since first entering the Turkish market in 2011, Yandex has been trying to seize market share from Google, which has dominated the local search market.
As of February 2013, Yandex had a mere 2% of the Turkish search market, but aims to reach 9% by the end of this year, with a long-term plan of attaining a 25% share in five years.
“The Turkish market is not only new for us, it also has a young audience, which we believe is not intimidated by innovation,” Yandex’s International Media Relations Representative Vladimir Isaev said in an exchange with East-West Digital News. “So, the idea is to accumulate all the feedback from Turkish users and then take it into consideration before we launch ‘Islands’ in other markets.”
According to data from the comScore qSearch Media Trend research, in April 2013, Yandex processed 113 million search queries in Turkey, way up from 25 million in the same month in 2012. At the same time, in April of this year, Yandex.com.tr was visited by 7.9 million unique users, which corresponds to 33-34% of the total Internet audience in Turkey.
From Yandex’s point of view, one of the key differences between Russian and Turkish Internet audiences is that the latter “tends to use a search engine as a point of entrance to their favorite websites. For example, users prefer to type “facebook“ in the search bar of their browser to be referred to Facebook’s site, instead of typing “www.facebook.com” in the address bar,” Isaev said.
In addition to advanced search capabilities, Yandex offers the Turkish Internet audience its WebKit-based Yandex.Browser, which is protected by Kaspersky antivirus technology and accelerated by Norway’s Opera Turbo for fast browsing even with a weak Internet connection. Moreover, the Yandex search engine is offered by default on all Windows Phone smartphones shipped to Turkey.
