Google is not popular in Russia
By Benj Arriola - Posted on Tue Dec 19, 2006Google, based on statistics, is probably the most popular search engine in the world today. But Russia is a whole different territory where language and culture is different and Google just can’t seem to penetrate.
What websites do Russian’s visit?
Most probably their own websites if you will ask me. I have no valid statistical study but I will base my findings from 3 websites looking at their ClustrMaps.
Action Online - Business and Technology Blog
Although these websites above are not really targeted for the Russian audience, it was not specifically targeted for the Chinese audience either. For Indian, Australian and for people in countries in Europe, but you can see still there is quite a large amount of traffic coming from those areas even if these sites are not specifically geo-targetted. But if you check the traffic from Russia, only some occasional one or two dots from Russia will come out.
But for sure the Internet is alive in Russia, with all these Russian SEO friends we have on Digital Point’s forum and also these SEO applications made by Russian programmers, for sure the Internet is alive in Russia. But what websites do they visit? Most probably they visit Russian websites as well.
Language and cultural preferences probably does not make Google the top search engine in Russia
The top visited websites in Russia as reported by Eric Pfanner on the New York Times says the top 3 most visited sites in Russia are Yandex, Mail.ru and Rambler. And based on online advertising revenue, Yandex controls 50% of the market and Rambler is second with 41%. The remaining 9% is for other online ad companies that include Google. Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh also says in this report:
“With real estate, it’s location, location, location,” he said. “On the Internet, it’s technology, technology, technology. We have this homegrown technology that in many cases is better than theirs.”
Ironically, one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin is a Russian and was born in Moscow in 1973. Unfortunately, Google is having a hard time dominating his mother land.
2 Responses to “Google is not popular in Russia”
Leave a Reply
December 19th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
[...] Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was born in Russia, in 1973. (I can’t believe we have the same age, but have way different amounts of money in our bank accounts. *LOL*) Although they moved to the US in 1979 with his family, Russian used to be his speaking native tongue in one point of his live. But being Russian has no effect on the popularity of Google.ru in Russia. And in fact, it barely reaches the top 10 visited websites in Russia where the top search engines are Yandex and Rambler. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
February 19th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
[...] I believe Yandex is almost as sophisticated as todays modern search engines which is why Google is not popular in Russia. And passing CAPTCHA is already something old that XRumer.com has been doing for years already in [...]