During 2011 Yandex lost 4% of searches in Russia to Google.ru, reports Vedomosti (in Russian). I heard mentions of this fact throughout last year, but here is how it looks in absolute numbers.

According to LiveInternet statistics, in December last year search market in Russia was divided between Yandex, Google.ru and other smaller search engines as shown below:

In December 2010 Yandex held 64,1% of the search market, and Google – 21,5%. Quite a big change in one year, isn’t it?

Analysts say that Google’s market share most likely increases not due to the search engine traffic itself, but because of other platform Google owns or has partnerships with. Presumably, the majority of growth  can be explained by wide use of Android devices (where search is powered by Google), social network Google+ as well as popularity of Chrome browser, which Google has been advertising on TV in Russia since half a year!

I have to mention, however, than Yandex also works with various partners and web browsers. Facebook search in Russia is, for example, powered by Yandex. Same goes for Windows Phone 7 and Firefox, among others. Needless to say that Aport and Rambler use Yandex’s search engine, and that Bing’s ads in Russia are in reality Yandex Direct.

Just like I predicted earlier, Yandex now announced a strong focus on mobile technologies in 2012, and not only on advertising. They acquired a mobile development company SPB Software, and, I suspect, is going to work on a response to Android – their own mobile OS.

A spokesman of Yandex told Vedomosti that the company expects 58-60% growth in revenue in 2012 and not focusing on increasing their market share, but rather creating new and useful products. The next big release, for example, is supposed to be a new search platform, which better understands interests and preferences of Internet users (read: personalized search).

In September 2011 Yandex processed over 3 billion search queries, reports comScore. This allowed Yandex to climb 2 positions up passing South Korean NHN Corporation (Naver) and eBay.

The leader is, obviously, Google with 118 billion queries (globally), followed by Chinese Baidu with 11 billion queries.

Yandex has been showing exceptionally fast growth in both traffic and revenues over the last years. Earlier this year the company raised $1,4 billion in a NASDAQ IPO, and a few months later reported astonishing 93% jump in net income comparing to Q3 of 2010. The company’s value is around $8 billion, which makes it one of the top 25 leading online buisnesses in the world:

Source: http://kpcb.com

Mail.ru, the 3rd largest search engine in Russia after Yandex and Google.ru, with 7% market share, announced their plans to invest into developing their search technology. The company plans to double the amount of specialists developing their search engine.

In the past search on Mail.ru was powered by Yandex, but replaced by Google’s technology in 2010. At the same time, a part of queries in Mail.ru is processed by their own algorithm. According to Mail.ru CTO Vladimir Gabrielyan, this makes sence: Google’s engine is used for general queries, while Mail.ru can focus on improving, for example, local search.

Currently, the main services for Mail.ru are more social than anything else: messengers, online games, email, social networks. Mail.ru Group, listed on London Stock Exchange, owns Mail.ru portal, instant messenger ICQ and social network Odnoklassniki.ru. The Group also owns parts of companies like vKontakte (39,9%), Zynga (1,4%), Groupon (21,35%), Facebook (2,4%).

Will be interesting to follow this development. While Google and Yandex are fighting for Russian market, does Mail.ru has a chance to increase their share?

I saw this in a number of Russian newspapers during February and found it rather interesting. Based in Russia visual search engine Quintura is going to sue Google over technology used behind Google’s Wonder Wheel. Wonder Wheel is a service that helps to visualize semantic relations between keywords. Russian Quintura launched a similar service back in 2006, and received the last of its 8 patents for this technology in 2009.

Quintura's semantic search cloud

The results are not exactly the same:

Google's Wonder Wheel semantic cloud

Yakov Sadchikov, the CEO of Quintura, mentioned in his interview to Infox (In Russian) that there are several companies who violated the patents and that Quinura will demand that all of them pay for using the technology.