In Some Places, Local Search Beating Google

babooo404 points out Newsweek coverage of Google focusing on areas in which the search giant may be vulnerable. In some countries outside the US, local competition is handing Google its head. In South Korea a company called Naver dominates. And in Russia, portal site Yandex leads in both search and advertising. In the Cyrillic language market Google is a distant third in search, and Yandex is trouncing Google in the advertising arena by 70% to 2%.

Comments

OTOH

[ceeam]

Still, Yandex is unbelievable crap - results-quality wise. I'd say Top3 go in reverse in this parameter. But the problem I think - apart from advertising (Y had a rather big ad campaign some time ago) - is that Google seriously dropped the ball and showed huge negligence and ignorance when entering local market unprepared - for example, their engine did not even search for different wordforms and Russian of course has an ultra-developed word endings system. So - at first - Google was 99% useless. Plus - Y had been around the longest and most people simply don't care about switching.

Re:Character sets?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can search in Cyrillic (and in other alphabets too), but it only looks for the exact words in the query, i.e. no morphological search. This is often good enough if you know exactly what you're looking for, like lyrics of a song, but if the query is more abstract, local search engines always win.

Re:Character sets?

[rxmd]

You can search in Cyrillic (and in other alphabets too), but it only looks for the exact words in the query, i.e. no morphological search.

This is actually not true anymore. For example, you can do a Google search for "Putin", and it will highlight results in other grammatical cases than the nominative as well. It has been like this for a year or so. It's still not very far advanced yet, but Google apparently realized that they've got catching up to do.