Tag: Yandex

  • Yandex Aims For 20% of Turkey’s Traffic

    Yandex Aims For 20% of Turkey’s Traffic

    Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, is aiming for at least 20% of Turkey’s search traffic after the company expanded there last year, according to the company’s co-founder.

    Ilya Segalovich, CTO of Yandex, told The Wall Street Journal Europe that in most markets the dominant search player has 60% to 70% of the market, while the second player has around 20% to 30%. His first aim is to be the second player in the market.

    “The first stage of success will be to have 20-30 market share. If we can get to the end of the year 5% that would be great for us. So far we have less than 1%,” he said.

    According to company figures released in January, Yandex is attracting some 100,000 daily users. Turkey’s online audience is estimated to be 35,000,000 according to Internet World Stats.

    Mr. Segalovich said Yandex had chosen the country as their first non-Russian speaking venture for two reasons: it was being under-served by Google and it provided a good challenge.

    Getty Images  Segalovich: Turkey is a huge opportunity
    Getty Images Segalovich: Turkey is a huge opportunity

    “We liked Turkey first because they have great growth opportunities. It is a huge country with lots of potential users [and a] fast-growing Internet. We looked at the services provided by Google. Without competition the quality of the services is lower than it is with competition.”

    But, said Mr. Segalovich, there was simply the difficulty of the challenge itself. “Will we be able to go to the country where we don’t know the language? It is not going to the country where most of the employees speak Russian, like Bulgaria or Poland. Going to Turkey no one speaks Russian. We had to redesign all the internal procedures and the parts of the engine to be worked with people who don’t know Russian.”

    There was one interesting challenge they had to tackle regarding their version of Street View: the law required them to blur faces. “That is technologically a hard task to do. Google was doing that. It required a super-hard effort to have a face recognition on a huge scale. We spent three months making this,” Mr. Segalovich said.

    But there was a problem. “Unfortunately, we blurred Ataturk’s face. There is another law that prohibits this in Turkey.”

    Now, every time a complaint is raised about blurring of Ataturk’s face, the company goes in by hand and manually un-blurs the image. “We are very happy to do this. It is about being culturally sensitive,” Mr. Segalovich said.

    Mr. Segalovich wouldn’t say which countries the company was looking at next, but did hint that further expansion was highly likely. He suggested that it was more likely to be elsewhere in Europe, rather than in areas like the Middle East.

    In a wide ranging interview, Mr. Segalovich also said Russian e-commerce is set to take off thanks to Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

    “The iPhone appears and suddenly Russians start to pay for apps on the iPhone,” he said. “You can imagine how hard it was to get people to pay just 100 rubles ($3.40) over the Internet just a few years ago. They were just ‘why should I? Can I find it free?’ Now it is getting more like a habit after the iPhone.”

    Mr. Segalovich was a guest speaker at the recent TNW conference in Amsterdam and discussed how the Russian Internet is changing and the company’s recent expansion into Turkey.

    He admitted that even if people wanted to pay for things, the mechanisms to do so and the logistics to deliver goods have some way to go. Still, he was optimistic that change was happening quickly.

    “You can look at the share of tickets bought online in Russia. After people start to use plastic cards to pay for tickets they get used to paying for anything else. That part of the story is changing rapidly in front of our eyes. There are lots of good signs about that.”

    Yandex is Russia’s largest search engine and claims to be the most popular site in the Russian-speaking Internet. In May 2011, Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq. It was the biggest U.S. IPO for a dotcom since Google Inc. went public in 2004.

    Ilya Segalovich,

    Russia,

    Turkey,

    Yandex

    via Yandex Aims For 20% of Turkey’s Traffic – Tech Europe – WSJ.

  • Yandex.Maps is now in Turkey with Panoramas!

    Yandex.Maps is now in Turkey with Panoramas!

    by Fırat Demirel on November 15, 2011

    Yandex entered into the Turkish search engine market as a new player but brought along many services, as well. One of the most important ones among these has been the map services by Yandex and now Yandex.Maps is in Turkey. Today at 14:50, Yandex Turkey is going to be introduced with a presentation at Webrazzi Summit but we are sharing the details in advance.

    Russian service provider will be providing Turkish users with a country map, street view (panorama), satellite view and the updated traffic news. Harita.yandex.com.tr is the address of the Yandex.Maps service where you can find the maps and satellite views of 81 provinces, 947 districts and 40 thousand villages/quarters.

    Resembling Google Maps, the map service of Google, and providing an easy usage, Yandex.Maps will also be ready for Turkey on popular mobile platforms very soon.

    Panoramas and Shooting Method

    Yandex Panoramas, which works just as Google’s Street View does; consists of the street shots taken by Yandex in İstanbul (3.205 km of roads, 447.812 photos, 111.953 panoramas) and Ankara ((1.706 km roads, 187.972 photos, 46.993 panoramas). Beside the street shots, Yandex has also taken images of Marmara Sea as well as some special locations (which you might guess about) and 360 degrees of special shots.

    If you have recently seen a car with a camera passing outside your house (in İstanbul and Ankara), this was probably a Yandex car. To be honest, we could not see the car, either but apparently Yandex took great shots around our office, as well

    The cars, which we found out to have a compass, a GPS and a resolution of minimum 10 megapixels, started to work at early hours on bright sunny days when the roads were empty. In narrow streets where it was impossible to go through with a car, they used bicycles with cameras or shot with hand cameras and the photos were combined into 360-degree-panoramic views. 4 different resolutions were used when uploading so as to let faster photo viewing.

    The photos were combined automatically in accordance with geographical coordinates and the plates and faces were blurred (as per the law).

    Yandex.Traffic and Data Resources

    This is one of the features of Yandex.Maps which will be most used in İstanbul. Yandex.Traffic will calculate the average index of traffic density and show the traffic data in green, red and yellow. Traffic density index is a rating system between 0-10, 0 being clear and 10 being highly dense. For example, if the traffic density index is 7, Yandex tell us that the trip will last twice as long as it does at clear times.

    Yandex Turkey shares the details of this service,too. We find out that this traffic data is provided by the GPS-equipped cars of the companies which aim to become partners with the service and great vehicle fleets. The coordinates, speed and directions info of these cars are communicated to Yandex.Traffic server and the most updated traffic info is compiled. As a result, the movement graph of the car is created by the analysis program of the system depending on the data acquired.

    Yandex states that this service also abides by the confidentiality procedures (keeping the info about the car, the car owner or the driver confidential).

    The Java and Android applications of Yandex.Traffic will soon be available for your mobile device on haritalar.yandex.com.tr. There is not an iPhone application yet (it will be available soon, though) for Yandex.Traffic and time will show if it will be able to compete with İBB Trafik but considering the fact that Java-based telephones are quite common in Turkey and the number of smartphone users is increasing each day, I reckon that Yandex.Traffic will gain popularity as Yandex grows.

    As for the effect of Maps services on the organic search rate of Yandex, we have to wait and see what will happen.

    via Yandex.Maps is now in Turkey with Panoramas! | Webrazzi Global.

  • Russian search giant Yandex expands into Turkey, opens Istanbul office

    Russian search giant Yandex expands into Turkey, opens Istanbul office

    Russian search giant Yandex expands into Turkey with new search portal and Istanbul offices

    Russian search giant Yandex today announced its expansion into Turkey, opening a Turkish version of its search engine and incorporating a range of other services tailored for Turkish users but also opening an office in Istanbul.

    Yandex has made sure to introduce its core search product but also serves pictures and videos, demonstrating small tweaks that can help users find books and poetry just by entering one line from the text itself. On top of its search features, Yandex’s Turkish portal will also offer email services, news, translation and other services.

    Yandex’s CEO Arkady Volozh notes how big a move this is for the Russian search giant:

    “It’s the first time we start offering web search services in a country where almost nobody speaks any Russian. We have considered countries with a well-developed internet market, a growing web user audience and a lot of local language content. Turkey was a clear first choice. Instead of just localizing our services for this country, we custom-built an entirely new product – tailored specifically to web users in Turkey.

    The company has already employed over twenty new staff in its new Istanbul office, making sure that it can add to its technological innovations with a deep understanding of the local culture, the language and the varying preferences of its users.

    In August, Yandex acquired ‘social newspaper’ service The Tweeted Times as part of a push to integrate more social data into its search results. Similar to Paper.li, it generates a ‘newspaper’ on the Web containing stories shared by people that they follow on Twitter. The team behind have now joined Yandex to work on boosting its search and content services with information from social networks.

    In 2010, Yandex generated 64% of all search traffic in Russia and was the largest Russian Internet company by revenue. It floated on the NASDAQ earlier this year.

    via Russian search giant Yandex expands into Turkey, opens Istanbul office.