WESTERN BASIC SEARCH ENGINES EYE RUSSIAN INTERNET SEGMENT

MOSCOW, March 17 (RIA Novosti) - The basic search engines of the world Internet - Google, Yahoo!, MSN - are seriously eyeing the Russian Internet segment for the game is worth the candle. The Russian web market is interesting for the West from the commercial point of view, general director of the biggest Russian search portal Yandex Arkadi Volozh told the press conference. Growth is noted in every segment of the Russian Internet. The volume of Internet adverts in 2004 increased by 90 percent to 40 million dollars.

So far, the Russian search engines are the most popular in only Ru.net. In the figures of the Russian monitoring agency SpyLog, in 2004 Yandex accounted for 50 percent of all the requests of Ru.net users, followed up by Rambler.ru with 25 percent, Russian-speaking Google being the third with 12 percent.

"Google, MSN and Yahoo! have already beaten the European portals", Mr. Volozh noted. "They may well occupy the Russian market but we are not sitting on our hands". The Russian search portals have interesting unrivalled ideas and developments.

Every month Yandex presents about 850 million pages for 16 million users, 80 percent of which are found in Russia. In 2004 the portal's incomes increased ten times in comparison with 2002, making up 17 million dollars. At that, 75 percent of the sum the biggest Russian searcher earned from search advertising, which has only recently become a sustainable business model.