Yandex Tops Bing, Becomes World’s Fourth Most Popular Search Engine

Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, has moved up in the worldwide search engine rankings to reach the fourth place, according to the latest data from comScore qSearch.

Google still retains a comfortable lead, with more than 62 percent of the market, followed by China’s Baidu with 8.2 percent, Yahoo with 4.9 percent, Yandex with 2.8 percent, and Microsoft with 2.5 percent.

“Yandex. We’ll find everything”

Yandex first entered the top 10 of online services at the end of 2007. It overtook Microsoft for the first time in November 2012, when it processed 4.62 billion search requests versus Microsoft’s 4.48 billion, leaving them both tied with roughly 2.5 percent share of the market. The Russian search engine’s lead widened further in December, giving it a 0.3 percent advantage.

However, 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.

The growth of Yandex has been underpinned by the rapid growth of Russia’s Internet penetration. “It’s thanks to the Russian audience that the number of Yandex searches grew,” said Yandex spokesperson Tatiana Komarova.

“Internet penetration is still relatively low in Russia and it continues to grow by adding older people and residents of small towns,” she added.

Yandex dominates the Russian search market with an estimated market share of 62 percent, far above Google’s 26 percent.

Outside of Russia, Yandex has significant market share on the Kazakh, Ukrainian, and Belorussian markets, processing up to 40 percent of the local search requests.

The Russian Internet giant has started to enjoy some traction in Turkey, where it launched its service in September 2011 in a bid to challenge Google’s dominance.

In 2010, Yandex launched an English-language version, earning praise for the accuracy of its results, according to the US business magazine Fast Company, but without significant success in terms of traffic.

On the NASDAQ, where Yandex began trading in May 2011, shares of the Russian company jumped 1.7 percent to $24.33 (£15.5) on Wednesday, reports Bloomberg, nearing its initial offer price of $25.

The Russian company now trades at 28.6 times estimated earnings, more than six times the average valuation of companies listed on Bloomberg Russia-US Equity Index.

This story originally appeared on East-West Digital News.

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