Russians dent Google’s world domination

I'm reading an article about Russia's biggest website, its equivalent to Google, called Yandex, in the Sunday Times. What a cool story and business.

It's a coincidence that I was talking to a Russian digital PR consultant in the Social Media Cafe networking gathering last Friday and he fired up Yandex on his Mac. He did it to illustrate how his home country maps out its wifi hotspots whereas we don't (Social Media Cafe has free wifi and I mentioned how annoying I is that it's so hard to find listings of free wifi). I suppose that if Yandex does useful things like tell you where your nearest wifi is then in some ways it's better than evil Google.

But get this. In the article, the Sunday Times chooses not to tell you the URL of Yandex. I think it may be rndex.ru, but that's a guess judging from the photo in the article. So I wonder how many people will be Googling Yandex today...

Comments

[Svetlana Gladkova]

It's an interesting observation but quite typical for traditional press coverage - writing everything but the link. And Google does a pretty good job when you google it for "yandex" - you get either yandex.ru or yandex.com depending on your search settings with both pages sending you where you are supposed to find Yandex. The only problem is that I don't think many people will actually bother to google "yandex" simply because they don't see much use in taking a look at a Russian-language web page full of some difficult to understand content (and unfortunately Yandex only offers certain parts like media kit and its ad network in English).