Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex, has launched their pay per click (PPC) service this weekend. Organised in much the same way as Google and Yahoo!’s offerings, companies are invited to bid on advert positions displayed alongside the search results. Hot on the heels of the other engines, they had recently developed image search and are already integrating these results with the text listings.

Google has already started their PPC service in Russia they have an estimated 10-15% of the market share compared to the 50%+ share Yandex command. Indeed they only won the rights to use the Google.ru domain name last month from cybersquatters.

Even though Google piped Yandex to the post in introducing PPC here they haven’t quite got their act together. The user agreement Russian companies are asked to digitally sign is only available in English and payments are restricted to credit cards. In Russia credit card usage is still rare, especially for company accounts, so they employ a system of transferring money through the banks; a fact that Yandex are obviously aware of and have accommodated into their offering.

However Yandex have made no public comment on their measures to combat the problems of click fraud, which are causing headaches for the other search engines. As Esther Dyson points out:

While Yandex is closer to Yahoo! in appearance, it’s spirit is closer to Google - including a obsession with algorithms and a passion for technical elegance.

Considering this, I will be interested to see what solutions they come up with for this problem, or what facilities they offer the advertisers here. We have already started using this service here at e3 and will report our findings.

The new media industry in Russia has been advancing at great pace in the last few years, headed up by designers such as Lebedev and Actis. Boris Antoniuk, the Russian IT minister, reports that the country now has more than 18 million internet users (compared to 83 million mobile telephone users). This move by Yandex is widely seen as a reflection of this growth as more Russian companies start to engage in online marketing.

For my non-Russian speaking readers, here’s the Yandex search for web design where you should see some PPC adverts.

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