Russian Web Search Powered by Google without ‘Powered by Google’

Earlier this month a leading Russian email provider and portal Mail.ru made huge international news due to rumors about the company abandoning Yandex search engine for Google. As of now, web search on the portal is powered by Yandex, the local Russian leader in online search. But rumors everywhere had it that the company would replace Yandex by Google in 2010 - which definitely posed an appealing opportunity for Google with its not very solid position in the web search in Russia.

But today the rumors have been confirmed officially by the companies in the press release about the new partnership. What Mail.ru is getting from Google is both its search technologies and extra monetization opportunities as the usual Google contextual ads will run alongside search results in the search requests initiated on Mail.ru pages.

This means that Google will both instantly increase its market share in the Russian market and will also get a huge publishing partner for display of AdSense ads. But of course the most important factor for the Russian search engines market is the distribution of market shares.

Now 10% owned by Mail.ru will go directly from “powered by Yandex” to “powered by Google” and the market shares will be redistributed accordingly: Yandex will drop from 69 to 59 per cent while Google will grow from 23 to 33 per cent respectively. This is obviously a smart move for Google as the global leader will be more than a half of the local leader finally - after the humble situation where it was almost three times smaller in Russia.

It is interesting that Google already has experience powering Mail.ru search in 2003-2005 (AdSense was also used at the time) but later on Mail.ru decided to switch to local Yandex for a now expiring 3-year contract. And as soon as in January they are switching back and while no official reasons are announced, rumors are that Yandex did not want to offer appealing conditions to Mail.ru as a market leader and insisted on branded web search as well - something Mail.ru did not want to have on its pages.

Unlike Yandex, Google is so willing to finally increase its market share in the Russian search market that they agreed to provide unbranded search technology to Mail.ru - and probably better revenue sharing conditions in advertising as well (though this is my guess only). And the result is the deal that is now officially confirmed.

It is interesting that this arrangement also lets Mail.ru continue developing its own search technologies - which this huge web development company is also experimenting with eagerly. So search powered by Google will be rotating with search powered by Mail.ru proprietary technologies - probably even without the users realizing it at all due to lack of evidence with no branding at all.

The bad part here of course is that Google is not really increasing brand awareness in Russia at all because lack of branding will mean that the vast majority of mainstream users will not notice any differences at all. So if Mail.ru decides to switch back after this new partnership agreement expires as well, the situation can easily be reverted and the market shares will not be affected - unless some other factors come into play additionally.

Via (in Russian)