Search Engine War: Yandex and Baidu Taking on Google…

This morning over coffee I just had to express what I use for search engines in the last few months. I decided that Google was just to big and controlling. That Google has too much information on everyone in the world and it is monopolized. It just does not seem right…

I have silently switched what I use as a search engine. I now use Russia’s Yandex and China’s Baidu in 75 percent of my searches. I have been watching them become better and better at search engine results as I use them more and more…

China’s top search engine Baidu said that it had signed a partnership deal with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to offer English-language search to Baidu users. Baidu dominates China’s search engine market after Google Inc pulled out following a high-profile fallout with Beijing over censorship last year…

Yandex, Google’s Russian competitor in online searches and Internet advertising, is looking to carve itself out a bigger share in cyberspace as Google faces serious antitrust charges. They are doing it on their own..

http://www.yandex.com is the English version of Yandex…
http://baidu.com is the Chinese search engine…

I realized when Google played the hypocrisy game and called China down for censoring. I had to laugh at that time because Google is the king of censoring. That issue alone with Google to call the kettle black, was enough that I knew it was time to tell Google, “You are a hypocrite!” What better way is to stop using the product that they produce. Up until now that has been hard to do. But now Yandex and Baidu have opened the doors…

The picture to the right is the ground campaign for the East. The one area that Google has been unable to control is the Eastern world. Yandex is King in Russia and Baidu is King in China. The King of the West (Google) is now watching with surprised eyes as the Easter world that he has tried to conquer, is expanding into his world…

Not all success stories in the West can penetrate the Eastern market. McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coke and a few others are the exception not the norm. Most Western countries leave with their tail between their legs after trying to enter China and Russia. You have to come with an open mind and leave the holier than thou attitude behind…

The story in the West of the partnership between Baidu and Bing is  interesting. Microsoft gets belittled for working with the censorship in China and Google is praised for its stand against China on censorship. Now that is hypocrisy at its capitalist best…

A year ago China’s Baidu said that they were getting 10,000,000 plus English hits a day from people trying to get search results from them in English. This prompted the partnership with Bing and Bing has smiled ever since… 🙂

Yandex is another story. This is the story that I consider the real success! Yandex is standing on its own two feet and ignoring all the Western world about how it should do what the West does. Yandex has decided to bite off one country at a time and grow at a pace that will not stress the corporate structure. The only move I saw associated with the Western world is the investment into Blekko. That allowed a foothold into the USA market…

http://download.yandex.ru/company/Fact_Sheet_Q2_2011.pdf – How about a company fact sheet?

Yandex has just moved into Turkey and Yandex has a smile that says we are going to grow, just watch and see…

So Yandex has also entered into the USA market. It has a branch in Palo Alto, California. As of June 30, 2011, they had over 3,000 full-time employees. Now that makes California smile. It is a growing company amongst the dead. Yandex has its teeth into the US and that will lead to market saturation in America, but its main goal is the East. The Western future saturation is the icing on the cake…

I looked at the internet market that is growing in the Eastern world. I have to say that it is impressive. It is largely an untouched market and has potential to easily exceed that of the Western world in just a few years. It is simply mathematics. Everyone (literally) lives on this side of the world and as infrastructures develops, so will the internet and business…

This is all fine for me as I live in Russia and watch from the outside as Google stifles the competition and tries to alter the search results to her favor. That makes sense from a competition point of view and many will say good job Google! I say bad Google! I do not like my search results messed with. When I punch in Gaddafi I want everything on Gaddafi. Not what only makes Google money…

Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia!

About the Author