Mail.ru Removed Yandex Search but Google Is Not Getting the Market Share Anyway

Some of you may remember that late last year the blogosphere was engaged in an animated discussion over decision of Mail.ru, one of the leading online portals in Russia, to replace search technology by local Yandex with that of Google.

Yandex (which is the leading search engine in Russia with a market share much higher than that of Google) has been the search technology of choice for Mail.ru for the previous 3 years but expiration of the contract provoked new negotiations with potential search partners. Rumors are that eventually Google search technology was selected because Google chose to provide unbranded search results – something Yandex was not willing to offer insisting on an attribution.

In addition to use of Google’s search engine itself, Mail.ru also opened its pages to Google AdSense,- hence becoming one of the major publishers for the advertising network in Russia. This extra income was probably the reason for Google to be willing to provide unbranded search technology where Yandex did not want to.

Another appealing factor that probably influenced the decision for Google was the market share in web search held by Mail.ru: its 10% previously served by Yandex were expected to be going directly to Google now – thus increasing the international search giant market share in Russia from its previous 23 per cent to 33 per cent which is much better comparable to 59 per cent that Yandex is supposed to have once Mail.ru switches the search providers.

The Google-powered search (without attribution but still) was supposed to appear on Mail.ru in January 2010 as officially declared in a press release issued by Mail.ru and Google in December. But now that we are half into January already, many of us here in Russia (me included) have been checking Mail.ru search once and again to see the results coming from Google instead of Yandex – and never getting what we expected and thinking that the delay was due to the lengthy holiday vacations.

But now it looks like the only thing that Google has acquired via this much-discussed deal is an increase in revenue due to a huge extra number of AdSense impressions – but the market share will probably remain the same for Google. The thing is that Mail.ru is obviously using another search provider, its own development named gogo.ru – and no Google is to be seen other than in ads.

The conditions of the deal had it that Mail.ru will be able to combine Google search with its own gogo in order for the company to continue developing its own technology. And now Mail.ru is happily using gogo – testing it under heavy loads as Mail.ru representatives claim – monetizing the search pages with AdSense and keeping Google as a backup in case gogo is unable to withstand the heavy load.

The worst part (for Google, I mean) is that Mail.ru representatives now claim that the currently used gogo (absolutely in compliance with the agreement between Mail.ru and Google), actually demonstrates impressive results – much better than expected – so they will probably keep Google as a backup engine and the international giant will not see any increase in its market share due to this deal at all – even if they initially hoped to.

Of course there are people here who already think that Russian authorities may be involved in the entire situation – and insisted on use of a local search engine instead of allowing the international company to grow its market share substantially here. But to me this seems to be unlikely and what it really looks like is Mail.ru funding development of its own search technologies using Google money – and not even violating any terms of the agreement with Google.

Via (in Russian)