The Russia-based search engine, Yandex, overtakes Bing and has now become the world’s fourth most popular search engine. Google still enjoys the major share of 62% of the global market and leads. China’s Baidu is placed at second and Yahoo stands at third place. Yandex now sits pretty at 4rth with 2.8% and Microsoft 2.5%.
Microsoft has spent billions into Bing to get a piece of the ad money pie. But it seems that other players in the market with much smaller budget are marching ahead at a much faster pace. And the most recent example is Yandex. The recent months have seen fewer queries for Bing while Yandex that serves only Russian-speaking markets and Turkey got more queries.
Yandex search engine has clearly sidelined Microsoft’s Bing, according to the recent statistics compiled by comScore’s qsearch. Where Microsoft processed 4.48 billion requests, Yandex enjoyed 4.62 billion search requests. Although Yandex has improved its performance, it still is way behind Google.
Yandex is the first Russian company to get a place in the competitive rankings. Yandex rolled out Android app store and its own web browser in Russia last year. It also developed Wonder, which is a sound activated visual search engine for Face book. Wonder lets people find businesses friends and get access to the photos and music these friends had been viewing ore listening.
Russia is experiencing a massive growth in its online market. Yandex hopes to increase its share in the market to 35% in the coming years. The target sure is ambitious but achievable, according to Aleksandr Vengranovich, a market analyst in Moscow. An English version of the search engine, however, failed to make any impact so far. It has opened up in Turkey, with a population of 75 million. It has already become the default search on Windows Phone operated handsets in Turkey.