Russian Search Engine Yandex Beats Bing 88
judgecorp writes "The Russian search engine Yandex has beaten Microsoft in the search engine rankings, taking fourth place behind Google, China's Baidu and Yahoo, according to ComScore. The result won't be encouraging for Microsoft, which will also be disappointed to see Bing behind its partner Yahoo."
It's actually pretty good here too. (Score:3, Interesting)
I use the Turkish version of Yandex (yandex.com.tr).
It is awesome when it comes to local stuff or very specific topics. Like when online shopping, you just search for the model number of the tv you want to buy and it finds where it's cheapest. You search for a movie, allow it to use your locaiton and "BAM" you get the nearest showtime at the closest place with ticket prices.
This is pretty silly. (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't a ranking of performance, it's a ranking of 'number of searches', which (for whatever it's actually worth, which is probably ad revenue only) can easily be gamed.
"Microsoft still attracted 268.6 million unique searchers in December, and Yandex just 74.4 million, which suggests that Yandex aficionados tend to use their search engine more intensively." ...which both points to MS's success in jamming it down people's throats as the 'first search' in any MS device (for chrissakes in Win7 google isn't even OFFERED as one of the search options - you have to download an extension to IE to set google as the default search, lol), AND likewise suggests that the Yandex results are in fact being gamed somehow.
The Chinese results are simple, it's in CHINESE, which has billions of native users.
Google dominates the english speaking world, and I guess Yandex gets the Russians.
Re:Oops-near miss (Score:4, Interesting)
A pun indeed.
CC.
Yandex is pretty cool, actually. (Score:3, Interesting)
Although I seldom use their search engine [yandex.ru] directly since they focus more on searches in Russian, I can confirm that it works very well. They also have, among other things, better maintained and more detailed maps [google.com] of ex-soviet countres with better traffic jam and accident tracking [yandex.ru], an EXTREMELY convenient product search [yandex.ru] that lets you specify an insane amount of properties and features to pick the most fitting item that exists on the market and then find a good rated and cheap place to buy it, a great multilingual online dictionary [yandex.ru] and a convenient online storage service [yandex.com] which has existed far longer than Google Drive. Their web pages have a simple, consistent and concise design, their ads are few and non-intrusive, and, on top of all this, the company has an almost cult standing among many tech students for its high wages and free CS and data mining school [yandex.ru] where they teach interested people in-depth data mining, artificial intelligence, algorithms and many other related and not-so-much things.
Why do I mention all this? First, to confirm that they are popular for a very good reason and, second, because most of their services use Internet data mining techniques to gather results, so if you live in CIS [slashdot.org], chances are you are hooked anyway and you generate many internet searches indirectly even if you don't use their search feature. Unless Google pays as much attention to foreign countries as it does to the U.S. and keeps expanding its services, it should not be surprising to see sound local competition in some countries.