Russia’s Very Own Search Engine, Yandex

Currently, there are only two countries within which Google is not the dominant search engine: Russia (Yandex) and China (Baidu).  Baidu’s success in China is due to the country’s limits on freedom of speech which led to Google’s withdrawal from the country in 2010.  However, in every other country in the world (even in North Korea, according to the website Statcounter), Google holds an average of 93% of the search engine market share.  The logical question, therefore, is how the Russian provider Yandex has managed not only to compete, but to overcome, Google in Russia.

Let’s quickly dive into the two search engine’s histories: both were created by college students in their dorms and released onto the web in 1996.  Google’s creators named their online indexer after “googol,” meaning infinite, while Yandex’s name origin is uncertain.  It either came from the amalgamation of the word “Index” and the pronoun “I” in Russian being the letter “Ya” to create Ya-ndex; or a shortened form of the expression “Yet Another Indexer.”  Google’s original slogan was “Do no evil,” and Yandex’s was “Everything is found (here).”  In July 2017, Yandex added to their original slogan “Number 1 search engine in Russia” when they surpassed Google in the national search engine market share.

However, Yandex does not hold a huge competitive edge over Google: as of December 2018, only 54% of Russians preferred Yandex while 42.69% were loyal to Google.  On Android phones, however, Google is currently ahead 66% to 33.4%. In Russia, two out of every three mobile phones users have Android phones.  The high percentage of Google Android users is mostly due to Google’s control of the Android operating system and their previous ability to pre-install their own company’s applications onto Android phones.  So, what is the driving force behind the 33.4% of Android users  who disregard their conveniently installed search engine and loyally download Yandex in its place?  On a larger scale, what draws 54% of search engine users to use a local provider over the most popular one in the world?

To begin with, in terms of the search engines, Yandex’s priority match provides more relevant information, given their narrower audience and available search results.  Google is forced to provide a wider scope of results to cater to its international audience.  Both Google and Yandex have this priority match system, using algorithms that base results on proven relevancy by previous users, content of the website, location, etc.  Given the difference in diversity of users, the percentage of total webpages relevant to Russian users is significantly fewer than to Google’s international audience.  For example, while information about American football is available on Yandex, it generally is not what Russians are looking for when they search “Cowboys.”  Ergo, why every result on the first page of Google for “Cowboys” is about the Dallas Cowboys, while less than half of the first page of results on Yandex are about the American football team.

Another limiting factor is Russian being the primary language of Yandex’s results: only 2.6% of the internet’s content is in Russian while 25.4% is in English, according to the website Statista.  While Google has to comb through countless languages and international relevancies, Yandex basically focuses on 2.6% of the internet and then implements its priority match to make its results even more relevant. Moreover, in addition to the actual results shown, looking for specific information is faster on Yandex, given a user’s ability to skim the first six lines of a website and/or read a summary of the webpage without opening the link, while Google only provides two lines on the results page. While results pop up infinitesimally faster on Google, not needing to open up the links to get the desired information makes Yandex’s search engine a more efficient use of time.

Beyond their search engines, both Google and Yandex now provide a wide variety of specialized products ranging from translators to physical technology. There is a surprising amount of product overlap between the two tech giants: over thirty of their services serve the same purpose.  However, Yandex generally focuses on facilitating access to information already in existence (e.g. to jobs, movies, food, traffic, people, realty, live television, coupons, textbooks) as well as copying other successful enterprises (such as Yahoo Answers, Pinterest, Google Translate, and social networking).  In contrast, Google’s products are focused on innovation: designing collaborative connective platforms (docs, sheets, chat, classroom) and better physical devices and platforms (such as virtual reality glasses, tablet, telephone, phone coverage, and Wi-Fi).[su_pullquote]Yandex focuses on facilitating access to information already in existence and copying other successful enterprises, while Google is focused on innovation.[/su_pullquote]

This could be due to the intention of the two providers:  while Google constantly invests capital and time into breakthrough technologies, Yandex simply strives to be the best provider of resources in Russia.  And it has succeeded in countless sectors: local maps and transportation resources are dominated by Yandex; its online store has made Amazon unknown in Russia; and Yandex.Taxi’s merge with Uber in June 2018 has made the latter functionally irrelevant.

Now, do Russian internet users truly believe Yandex is the better of the two? I conducted an online survey to directly determine resource preferences of local college students.  Out of 30 respondents, 75% of them preferred Yandex, and only three used resources from both. The survey also substantiated the correlation between Google and Androids, but the most startling finding was the reasons provided for their preferences.

I found that their reasons for using Yandex or Google fell into four general categories: design, convenience, access to information, and cultural relativity.  While only three survey respondents specifically cited Yandex’s specific relevance to Russia, the grand majority used the word “удобный”, meaning “convenient, suitable” as the main reason for their preference.  22-year-old Oleg justified his Yandex preference in saying that “Yandex is more directed towards Russians and gives more detailed, precise information in our country.”  This is unsurprising, given the scope of the priority match systems, but it also plays into the theme of national pride surrounding the success of a Russian-originating company.  Yandex isn’t only relevant, but also important to Russians. This search engine created for their nation’s needs ties national pride and loyalty into its mission. This led one of the survey respondents to reply succinctly, “[I choose] Yandex, no need to think about it.”[su_pullquote align=”right”]“[I choose] Yandex, no need to think about it.”[/su_pullquote]

Russia has had an uneasy relationship with the West for centuries – and Google is a clear symbol of the West expanding into the global conscience. Yandex as a Russian creation catering to a national audience has a convenient market isolation common to Russian companies.  The significance of this isolation has become clearer in the Russian President Putin’s increasing encouragement of Yandex in Russia.  He celebrated the company’s twentieth anniversary with Yandex’s CEO in September 2017 and has helped the company win an anti-trust war against Google, forbidding Google from pre-installing its apps on Android phones. Given that “convenience” was listed as the top reason for search engine preference, inconveniencing Google users in this minor way appreciably helps Yandex keep its majority market share.

The influence of the Russian government on this information provider remains uncertain, but Yandex maintains that its search results are determined by algorithms without any manipulation.  Unfortunately, this is blatantly untrue. As a result of government pressure and legislation in 2014, Yandex shows only government-approved news sites on the first page of results. In 2017, the Russian government amped up its censorship with legislation enforcing bans of sites on the national blacklist.  While Yandex complied, Google did not, resulting in a $10,000 fine. In the same way that Google pulling out of China significantly reduced Chinese internet access, Yandex’s compliance with these two censoring measures allowed it to stay in the good favor of the Russian government to similarly detrimental consequences.  If Yandex continues to dominate the search engine market in Russia, Russians could experience widespread information suppression in the near future.

Daria Locher ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at daria.locher@wustl.edu.