Yandex, the Russian search giant, has maintained its leadership on the domestic Internet market, with a 55% market share on all devices in July 2018, up 1 percentage point in one year. The numbers have just been published by Yandex, whose tool Yandex.Radar monitors search market share and browser trends in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey.
Yandex’s leadership is due to its position on the desktop market – which is key in Russia – with a 65% share of desktop-generated queries, up from 64% in July 2017.
Google, on its side, has been leading the mobile search market for years; however, the Russian company is actively challenging its US counterpart’s leadership. Yandex has been helped by a Russian court decision which obliged Google to develop an active ‘choice window’ for its mobile Chrome Browser. The settlement, in April 2017, followed a two-year legal procedure over what the Russian authorities judged to be violations of the antimonopoly legislation.
The ‘choice window’ has had an immediate measurable effect on mobile users’ behavior. According to Yandex.Radar, Google has lost 7 percentage points on the Russian mobile search market in one year (from a 60% market share in July 2017 to just 53% now), while Yandex has seen its own share rise from 40% to 46%.
Source: Russian Search Marketing
