Yandex – A Rival To Google?
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John
3 years ago -
2959
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Enter Yandex
Last week top Russian search engine Yandex launched the UK version of it’s website, and according to some, looks set to be genuine competition for Google and their dominance of UK search.
At the end of last year Yandex was the fastest growing search engine in the world, ranking 8th overall, with Google at number one (Yandex saw a 94% percent growth between July 2008 and July 2009)*
*Source: comscore.com
Background
So Yandex.com has been available for just over a week in the UK in it’s alpha format, but according to their spokesman Ochir Mandzhikov, Yandex has been indexing foreign pages for the last two years; cataloguing a reasonable 4 billion foreign-language pages. This on it’s own isn’t particularly impressive for a worldwide search engine; in 2008 Google claimed they had indexed 1 trillion websites and according to Mandzhikov himself, most worldwide search engines would index around 100 billion pages.
So why then does Ochir Mandzhikov seem so confident about the launch of Yandex in the UK? And how exactly do they plan on becoming a major rival to the ever dominant Google?
For starters, many people (Mandzhikov included) don’t believe that all of Google’s 1 trillion indexed pages are by any means all useful or relevant. Victor Lavrenko, founder of nigma.ru (search engine), suggests that only a few tens of billions of useful sites are indexed on Google, with the rest being made up of duplicate sites, hacked sites or spam content.*
Source: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/yandex-launches-foreign-language-search-engine/406343.html
Google vs. Yandex
So let’s get on to the Yandex.com website – my immediate impressions of Yandex are all pretty good; the homepage is reminiscent of Google’s new minimalist approach (see image above) and the results are displayed in an extremely user-friendly way – the results are numbered, which is a nice little touch, and fav icons are displayed along with the results (assuming the webpage has them installed).
There are also no advertisements on Yandex, meaning there’s literally no pay per click element to the search engine whatsoever – in terms of user experience this is fantastic, but i’m unsure as to how Yandex hope to truly rival Google without their biggest income earner.
So how do the results returned from Yandex actually differ to Google?
SPAM CONTENT
First and foremost, Yandex seems to be actively penalising any kind of advertising or spam content on your website; Yandex’s algorithm appears to analyse the types of banners you have on your site, using their type to determine spam content. For example, if you have any kind of pop-up banner, redirect or generally anything that abrubtly takes the user away from the site seems to be fairly heavily punished by Yandex.
This would explain why Yandex’s results pages are far cleaner than Google’s – the results feel far more natural; which can only be a good thing for companies that refuse to utilise ‘black hat’ SEO techniques. A word of warning though, i can’t image that Yandex would be able to distinguish from spam content pop-ups and genuine customer service, or user competition pop-ups. If you’re looking at trying to push your website up the Yandex results page, it may be worth avoiding pop ups and redirects all together.
LINK ANALYSIS
Yandex has it’s own version of Google’s PageRank, called the TIC (or Thematic Citation Index). From what i can tell, it’s fairly similar in that it evaluates the quantity and quality of inbound links to your site, using those figures to determine your how highly you site ranks in the TIC. It’s worth noting however that Yandex completely ignores any inbound links from forums, web boards, free hosted sites and unmoderated catalogues – basically anywhere you can add a link for free without having to go through a moderator or webmaster.
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Yandex appears to put far more emphasis on geographic location of sites than Google does; Yandex’s algorithm utilises something called the “Arzamas These Days”, which analyses your site’s location by IP address, domain name and geographical content on the site (post codes, addresses, phone numbers, etc). It then provides different users with different results dependent on the searchers location. In theory, this would deliver far more relevant results back to the user.
SEO Implications
From what i’ve seen so far, the search engine optimisation techniques most utilised to improve Google results will probably pay dividends on Yandex too – both sites put a huge amount of emphasis on penalising duplicate content, whilst rewarding content that is fresh and original. I’m also pretty much certain that meta information and other on-site optimisation techniques will also be fairly heavily relevant to Yandex’s algorithm, just as it is with Google.
So essentially you’re still looking for fresh content, lots of inbound links and of course, link relevancy. Link building as an optimisation excercise should genuinely pay off on both search engines, and as always, content is king.
I’ll keep up the Yandex related posts as i learn more about it, but until then, here’s a fun fact for the day:
The name Yandex comes from the phrase ‘Yet Another INDEXer’. Take that Google.
8 comments so far to - Yandex – A Rival To Google? -
In your post, u say Google is fighting with spamdexig. I don’t agree. I submit spamreports for years now and they are not followed. I had to abandon the exploitation of one user content generated website because it never came higher than the page 80 on google. And my wallet was not big enough to spend so many dollars in Adwords.
Now I realise Google is playing with that to make u pay on Adwords. Of course, when I see the resultst ( parked domain, duplicate site, blank page, irrelevant content ) everything is done to make u pay.
In my opinion, google has gone too far. They believed they were ruling the world, now they have the European Commission on their back and Yandex is coming.
I hope some employees at google can realise they made a wrong choice. It is never a good idea to be insulting webmasters, such strategies work on short term never in long term.
Do you have also news from Yandex IPO ?
I also read Teoma ( IAC ) was back.
but the results there are very poor ( lots of spam )
Yandex is very clean indeed
It is good to know that a search engine company wants to seriously rival Google, though for now its just too early to say anything or make comparisons.
however, avoiding spam and bad user experience providers like pop-ups is a serious no-no and the fact that yandex is taking it seriously is a very positive thing. and yes google can index trilions of webpages, but we all know how difficult is to rank a page them… no point having billions of duplicate content/spam pages and at the same time, no point indexing them or bragging about the same indexed pages.
if yandex has indexed quality pages, even though its in millions it will make loads of search users happy and satisfied.
I think its just impossible for someone new in search engine market to overshadow google.
oh.. wow! this is really amazing,. and i think yandex is a very nice also,. anyway i will try to observe this.
I checked out Yandex myself and I think the results look very promising. It may take them awhile, but if they keep up natural and stellar search results with a good user experience, I think they can compete.
Seems pretty good, misses a lot of stuff out mostly irrelavant things however it could be one of them you want!.
for ‘merrehill’ it completely misses out our youtube,twitter and facebook pages
I got 33 results on yandex and google gave 470, i’d say give an option to filter and default to on so you can get a full result if you want it.
I don’t think ANY user engine can rival Google. Yandex is hardly a rival to Google. Yahoo might in a few years, but not at this point. Yandex shouldn’t even dream about rivaling the world’s best search engine.