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don't put it on the friggin internet!

http://sneglive.ya.ru/

You're looking at the wrong page. Try this one.

Yandex has a light version of their website (even more minimalistic than Google), just like Yahoo. The reason why Yandex is still more popular than Google in Russia is because it handles language-specific morphological variations of words better.

So far all I see is slightly screwed up interface with another extra "top bar" added on top of "iGoogle". I don't need it there. I like the way it worked before.
But on top of that, Google has been so adamant at killing off search spam, that lately my search results started to become less and less relevant. So I switched to the Russian search system Yandex instead. While they may have lesser part of the interned indexed, I have a better luck with their results. Heck, even Live.com seems to become more pleasant results-wise.

1) Windows OS is much more prevalent on the net than any other kind of Windows. So a content-neutral search engine should find the OS-related links first.
2) MSN actually finds some Windows OS - related pages - Windows Media Player, Tablet PC, WinXP for Tablet PC and others. The problem is that the most relevant page (Windows Family Home Page) is not listed first.
3) Information about Satyajit Ray and Jupiter is not terribly relevant to "windows" search term. Heck, on the page about Ray the word is included only once in the ALT parameter of one of the images. The page about Jupiter is marginally better because "windows" is used in the title, domain name and one link (to the "Windows Team"). How on Earth is that considered more relevant than the main Windows page is a mystery to me.

P.S. BTW, most search engines suck at general searches, like "windows", including Google. Links to WinZip, WinAmp and Adobe Acrobat probably shouldn't be included on the first page. Still, the biggest advantage of Google (in addition to "it just works" concept) is moderate amount of ads, clearly separate from search results. I've been using only Google and Yandex (A "Russian Google" - a quality and innovative search engine, also with cool minimalist page) and already forgot about the nightmare of "sponsored links"...

While in English we just have "japanese" I have counted 4 conjugation forms for this adjective in Russian. These forms differ by suffixes, so, google isn't the easiest choice for such searches.

Exactly. The international support in Google is excellent hands down. I use it for Russian language searches whenever I know exactly what wordforms I need to look for, any other inflexions aside.
NB: There is Yandex for grammatically robust Russian web search, though it doesn't exhibit the kind of relevance Google brings.

It's worth noting that Yandex, the tzar of Russian Internet search has, apart from the main portal-like facade, got a search-only back entry, which is the prettiest minimalistic search page i've ever seen.