Mail.ru have launched a new search engine into Runet this week, called “GoGo”.
GoGo allows you to search for web pages, pictures, photo and video files. In addition, area search index included Otvety.mail.ru service. The search engine currently indexes 1 billion Web pages, 100 million photographs and 500 thousand video files.
Mail.ru have built their popularity by providing a Hotmail-like service in Russia, reports last week placed them as the second most popular destination in Runet, well above Google who failed to appear within the survey results.
Rumours of a Mail.ru search engine have been getting louder after the launch of their WAP search engine last year. Mail.ru had been sourcing both organic and contextual advertising from market leader Yandex. Yandex Direct (contextual) adverts appear on the new beta engine so it seems they will continue this relationship in part.
Nick Wilsdon
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@Daniel
Yandex is *a lot* better than Begun but still not as easy to operate as the Adwords system. It seems Google has finally started tackling Russia now, with their recent purchase of Begun.
My guess would be that this purchase was more to do with their existing PPC contracts (i.e. Rambler), the customer base and the fact that Begun already have trained PPC support staff. I doubt it had much to do with the system itself. I expect Google has already started the process of moving everything across to Adwords and we’ll see Begun reduced to little more than a brand name (if that).
Coming to Nick’s last sentence: “One thing we’re not short of in Russia is programmers, we just seem to lack a bit of thinking on the usability side.” I can confirm, that usability and Russian websites seem to be an antonym. Trying to book some adds with Begun (respective Rambler) or Yandex is a nightmare if you are not located in Russia. Even with a native speaker aside it took me days to sort out the process from stocking up with “Webmoney” until actually going live with an add, which than ended up on some doggy sex site. Despite Googles “quasi monopoly” I would love to see them grow or buy in Russia rather sooner then later.
Yes David, it’s good to have some new blood in the SE arena. Although the Russian search market is much more diverse than the UK/US/EU where Google dominates.
I wonder if Google like the new name? It has got some slight similarities to their brand 😉 Maybe I’m just too used to Google now!
>Partnering with Yandex for contextual ads also seems to be a great move.
Yes Google had that contract previously for Adwords but lost it late last year to Yandex. I don’t think Mail.ru will launch a contextual advertising platform but you never know. Begun’s system isn’t great so these other players could develop a tool to take network share away from them. One thing we’re not short of in Russia is programmers, we just seem to lack a bit of thinking on the usability side.
Way to go GoGo. Seems they took a different approach offering mail services then going after search. Partnering with Yandex for contextual ads also seems to be a great move.