5 ms·

Russians dent Google’s world domination

37 points by nickb 18y ago

mynameishere 18y ago
Wow. I can't believe they don't switch to local languages, as with google.ru.
rgrieselhuber 18y ago
The same is here in Japan, where Yahoo has a much stronger lead. It's one thing to localize your UI, quite another to localize your approach. The second piece is crucial.
siculars 18y ago
/rant There can be no doubt that Russia has many, many brilliant mathematicians and engineers (poets, writers and musicians too). Everyone knows this. And, individually, I know their people can be quite lovely. The problem is that these people are in Russia. Russia crushes all. How many times do people have to get burned by Russia to realize Russia is a trade - not an investment? How long before the wannabe czar declares "all your routers/servers/data/money/life are belong to us"? "Russians", by and large, are not affluent. A relative handful of Moscowvites are. Mark Franchetti is obviously on the payroll but why he would write this blatant puff piece about "yet another indexer" is beyond me. These people have nothing Google, Yahoo and even Microsoft can and have put together. The only thing they do have is an advantage in the understanding of native Russian language and society. Ok, so? There is no market for Russian services outside of Russia. The rest of the world speaks English, French, Spanish, Arabic or some version of Chinese with a smattering of Portuguese thrown in for good measure. Since the Empire struck back in Georgia, international monetary outflows from Russia have been at their highest levels since the Great Ruble Implosion of the late 1990's. Lets face it gang, when the big ugly bear flexes its muscles people run for cover. Nobody wants to be in bed with his highness, the dread nightmare Putin. Who here thinks Putin has his peoples best interest at heart? Who here thinks a goal of Russia is to increase the prosperity of its people? Putin is out for numero uno, Putin. And the main concern for Putin is Gazprom. Who here thinks that Yandex will continue to fly under the radar of the FSB indefinitely? Who here thinks an independent, privately owned and operated company can exist in Russia without connections to their political/military/underworld/secret police? (off topic) People in the West love to bitch and moan about the US all day long. 'Hegemony', 'Imperialism', 'Totalitarianism' and, lest we forget, torture. Has everyone fallen asleep at the wheel? If you are from the West and do not have an ancestral connection to mother Russia, you have no idea what any of those words mean. It will be many generations (hopefully that short) before Russia is friendly enough as a national entity to do anything even related to business with. In closing, if this Yandex knows whats good for them they will pull up stakes, run dont walk and leave Russia with extreme haste and plop themselves down anywhere else. London, Paris, Silicon Valley, New York, Madrid. Pick one, any of a dozen or more cities would be better than the dump that we know today as Russia. Oh, in the fairness of full disclosure, if it sounds like I am anti-Russia in the extreme, I am. Honestly, which Olympic medalist of any color has defected from the West to Russia? We here in America have Russia to thank for our brand new Olympic individual gymnastic all-around Champion, Nastia Luikin :) /end rant
- asdflkj 18y ago
  Your simplistic view of Russia is what happens when you learn some select facts and plug them into a formula that's designed to accommodate Western societies. If every fact you know about Russia (assuming even that your facts are accurate, which is unlikely if you read Anglophone media) suddenly became true in America, things would certainly become worse. Sort of like if you added garlic salt to ice cream, it would taste worse, and this doesn't prove that garlic salt is bad. For people who want to understand Russia, I suggest learning more about the 90s, and what was actually happening there while The Economist and the rest of them were falling over themselves with praise. It will put into perspective what they're saying now. Here's a teaser: http://media.hoover.org/images/graph2.GIF http://media.hoover.org/images/graph2.GIF If nothing else, it will remove the desire to pontificate on "the big ugly bear" and "the dread nightmare Putin".
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    Isn't it interesting how Russia is so easily accommodating to such simple theories? Seems like there's no need to learn anything more detailed at all -- the simple views are consistently upheld by Russia's actions. Russia is a great country. It deserves better than Putin and a continuation of oligarchy.
    - asdflkj 18y ago
      It's easy to find any set of facts to accommodate any simple theory, if the implications of it don't have any effect on your life. Most otherwise reasonable Russians also believe things about America that are just ridiculous. I'd ask you what actions you're talking about, but this isn't the place for that.
      - davidw 18y ago
        > I'd ask you what actions you're talking about, but this isn't the place for that. +1
    - siculars 18y ago
mojuba 18y ago
Yandex doesn't index the entire Internet though, but only some selected part of it, mostly pages under .ru and all ex-USSR TLDs, plus domains submitted to them manually. Not very impressive I must say. news.ycombinator.com, for one, isn't in their index. Edit: in addition to ex-USSR TLDs they also index web sites that map to IPs physically located in ex-USSR, regardless of the domain.
- ii 18y ago
  AFAIK it's their policy to index only Russian language content and they do it pretty good. They can index domains in any zone as long as their content is in Russian. Anyway IMHO Google gives better search results in Russian. I guess they have more users here for the same reasons Yahoo does better in Japan. It's all about culture.
  - mojuba 18y ago
    The problem with Yandex is that it does index English language content, however not all users (by far not all!) are aware that it's limited geographically and by TLDs. If I look up, say, "Succinctness is Power", which should bring up PG's essay on his web site, Yandex instead retrieves a bunch of pages that mention the article and also Russian translations rather than the original. So the user is left thinking that the original is not even on the web (unless she carefully examines the links on web pages that pop up in the result set). They were clever enough to index en.wikipedia.org, although it is usually not at the top for some very obvious requests (e.g. try "Turing Machine"), which is an indication of a rather poor ranking system. My impression is, Yandex does not compete with Google in any way. Despite its slogan ("Everything can be found" or something like that) it's just a limited web index that doesn't even state explicitly about its limitations. And that's strange at least. Edit: NB: they have a minimalist front-end at ya.ru
    - raquo 18y ago
      Yandex is local - limited to CIS (ex-USSR zone) in terms of people the search results (and the search index) are optimized for. Yandex is mainstream, it's not a geeky site, and most Russians don't speak English well enough to prefer originals to translations. So most of its users just don't arrive at the limits of Yandex's index ever. Of course it's nice for me to be able to go to google.com and search in Russian or in English or in any other language (and get results in the language I search), but it's just not what the majority of Russians needs or wants. Their policy on the search index was 'only russian-language content' (their bot analyzes page text rather than looks at the TLDs or IPs), then a couple of years ago they started including more and more sites in english, starting from encyclopedias etc. This is possibly also because their indexing technology was deep into morphology of Russian language from the very start in late 1990-s. PS their slogan is a bit more dramatic - 'Everything WILL be found' :)
ii 18y ago
Another nice thing about Yandex is that they use Django in several project and actively contribute to it. They even held Django sprint this summer in their Moscow office.

37 points by nickb 18y ago

Wow. I can't believe they don't switch to local languages, as with google.ru.

The same is here in Japan, where Yahoo has a much stronger lead. It's one thing to localize your UI, quite another to localize your approach. The second piece is crucial.

siculars 18y ago

/rant There can be no doubt that Russia has many, many brilliant mathematicians and engineers (poets, writers and musicians too). Everyone knows this. And, individually, I know their people can be quite lovely. The problem is that these people are in Russia. Russia crushes all. How many times do people have to get burned by Russia to realize Russia is a trade - not an investment? How long before the wannabe czar declares "all your routers/servers/data/money/life are belong to us"? "Russians", by and large, are not affluent. A relative handful of Moscowvites are. Mark Franchetti is obviously on the payroll but why he would write this blatant puff piece about "yet another indexer" is beyond me. These people have nothing Google, Yahoo and even Microsoft can and have put together. The only thing they do have is an advantage in the understanding of native Russian language and society. Ok, so? There is no market for Russian services outside of Russia. The rest of the world speaks English, French, Spanish, Arabic or some version of Chinese with a smattering of Portuguese thrown in for good measure. Since the Empire struck back in Georgia, international monetary outflows from Russia have been at their highest levels since the Great Ruble Implosion of the late 1990's. Lets face it gang, when the big ugly bear flexes its muscles people run for cover. Nobody wants to be in bed with his highness, the dread nightmare Putin. Who here thinks Putin has his peoples best interest at heart? Who here thinks a goal of Russia is to increase the prosperity of its people? Putin is out for numero uno, Putin. And the main concern for Putin is Gazprom. Who here thinks that Yandex will continue to fly under the radar of the FSB indefinitely? Who here thinks an independent, privately owned and operated company can exist in Russia without connections to their political/military/underworld/secret police? (off topic) People in the West love to bitch and moan about the US all day long. 'Hegemony', 'Imperialism', 'Totalitarianism' and, lest we forget, torture. Has everyone fallen asleep at the wheel? If you are from the West and do not have an ancestral connection to mother Russia, you have no idea what any of those words mean. It will be many generations (hopefully that short) before Russia is friendly enough as a national entity to do anything even related to business with. In closing, if this Yandex knows whats good for them they will pull up stakes, run dont walk and leave Russia with extreme haste and plop themselves down anywhere else. London, Paris, Silicon Valley, New York, Madrid. Pick one, any of a dozen or more cities would be better than the dump that we know today as Russia. Oh, in the fairness of full disclosure, if it sounds like I am anti-Russia in the extreme, I am. Honestly, which Olympic medalist of any color has defected from the West to Russia? We here in America have Russia to thank for our brand new Olympic individual gymnastic all-around Champion, Nastia Luikin :) /end rant

asdflkj 18y ago
Your simplistic view of Russia is what happens when you learn some select facts and plug them into a formula that's designed to accommodate Western societies. If every fact you know about Russia (assuming even that your facts are accurate, which is unlikely if you read Anglophone media) suddenly became true in America, things would certainly become worse. Sort of like if you added garlic salt to ice cream, it would taste worse, and this doesn't prove that garlic salt is bad. For people who want to understand Russia, I suggest learning more about the 90s, and what was actually happening there while The Economist and the rest of them were falling over themselves with praise. It will put into perspective what they're saying now. Here's a teaser: http://media.hoover.org/images/graph2.GIF http://media.hoover.org/images/graph2.GIF If nothing else, it will remove the desire to pontificate on "the big ugly bear" and "the dread nightmare Putin".
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  Isn't it interesting how Russia is so easily accommodating to such simple theories? Seems like there's no need to learn anything more detailed at all -- the simple views are consistently upheld by Russia's actions. Russia is a great country. It deserves better than Putin and a continuation of oligarchy.
  - asdflkj 18y ago
    It's easy to find any set of facts to accommodate any simple theory, if the implications of it don't have any effect on your life. Most otherwise reasonable Russians also believe things about America that are just ridiculous. I'd ask you what actions you're talking about, but this isn't the place for that.
    - davidw 18y ago
      > I'd ask you what actions you're talking about, but this isn't the place for that. +1
  - siculars 18y ago

mojuba 18y ago

Yandex doesn't index the entire Internet though, but only some selected part of it, mostly pages under .ru and all ex-USSR TLDs, plus domains submitted to them manually. Not very impressive I must say. news.ycombinator.com, for one, isn't in their index. Edit: in addition to ex-USSR TLDs they also index web sites that map to IPs physically located in ex-USSR, regardless of the domain.

ii 18y ago
AFAIK it's their policy to index only Russian language content and they do it pretty good. They can index domains in any zone as long as their content is in Russian. Anyway IMHO Google gives better search results in Russian. I guess they have more users here for the same reasons Yahoo does better in Japan. It's all about culture.
- mojuba 18y ago
  The problem with Yandex is that it does index English language content, however not all users (by far not all!) are aware that it's limited geographically and by TLDs. If I look up, say, "Succinctness is Power", which should bring up PG's essay on his web site, Yandex instead retrieves a bunch of pages that mention the article and also Russian translations rather than the original. So the user is left thinking that the original is not even on the web (unless she carefully examines the links on web pages that pop up in the result set). They were clever enough to index en.wikipedia.org, although it is usually not at the top for some very obvious requests (e.g. try "Turing Machine"), which is an indication of a rather poor ranking system. My impression is, Yandex does not compete with Google in any way. Despite its slogan ("Everything can be found" or something like that) it's just a limited web index that doesn't even state explicitly about its limitations. And that's strange at least. Edit: NB: they have a minimalist front-end at ya.ru
  - raquo 18y ago
    Yandex is local - limited to CIS (ex-USSR zone) in terms of people the search results (and the search index) are optimized for. Yandex is mainstream, it's not a geeky site, and most Russians don't speak English well enough to prefer originals to translations. So most of its users just don't arrive at the limits of Yandex's index ever. Of course it's nice for me to be able to go to google.com and search in Russian or in English or in any other language (and get results in the language I search), but it's just not what the majority of Russians needs or wants. Their policy on the search index was 'only russian-language content' (their bot analyzes page text rather than looks at the TLDs or IPs), then a couple of years ago they started including more and more sites in english, starting from encyclopedias etc. This is possibly also because their indexing technology was deep into morphology of Russian language from the very start in late 1990-s. PS their slogan is a bit more dramatic - 'Everything WILL be found' :)

ii 18y ago

Another nice thing about Yandex is that they use Django in several project and actively contribute to it. They even held Django sprint this summer in their Moscow office.