Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh unveiled ambitions to expand into the European, Latin American and Asian markets at the TechCrunch Moscow international conference yesterday. The move will put the Russian search giant on a course to more directly confront dominance by Google on these markets.
With its Turkish version launched in September this year, Yandex ceased to be merely a domestic player, Volozh stressed in his address at the conference.
Volozh had earlier declared in late October that Yandex was “in a state of war with Google,” complaining the US company didn’t allow Google Chrome users to switch to Yandex as default search engine.
While these statements remove any lingering doubt about the company’s global ambitions, Yandex is unlikely to pose any immediate threat to Google’s presence on international search markets. Despite its strong technology, Yandex is still ranked only 5th among search engines worldwide.
Yandex enjoys a healthy 62% market share domestically, but outside Russia Yandex only has significant market shares on the Kazakh, Ukrainian, and Belorussian markets, with approximately 25%, 29%, and 39% of the local markets, respectively, as of last year.
Launched in 2010, Yandex’s English-language version earned praise for the accuracy of its results, but has gained no noticeable traction among English speaking users so far.
In September 2011 Yandex also invested in Blekko.com, a US search engine, with the stated goal of obtaining “an opportunity to see how a search engine works on the US market,” according to Yandex spokesman Ochir Mandzhikov in a recent exchange with East-West Digital News.
Poland – the next Yandex target?
Last week, the Yandex international development strategy hit the ground running in Eastern Europe with the announcement that Seznam.cz, the largest web search engine and information portal in the Czech Republic, had launched a video search service using its technology.
Poland could well be the next target in the region for Yandex. The Russian company has already selected Bogdan Wisniewski as Business Development Director for Poland, as revealed on Wisniewski’s LinkedIn profile. Furthermore, rumor has it that Yandex is eyeing major Polish portals One.pl and Wp.pl, according to information published last week by Russian online business publication Marker.ru, referring to unnamed sources in the local Internet industry.
Google dominates the Polish search market with over 95% market share, but Yandex could benefit from its specific experience with Slavic languages, especially the Czech language which is linguistically close to Polish. The Yandex Czech video search engine is based on local language algorithms, taking Czech grammar into account, said the company, whose team now includes members from the Czech Republic.
