Competitors of Google in Europe: Yandex and Seznam

a Few weeks ago, the Czech online industry suddenly was a noise. Google allegedly bypassed the search engine Seznam market share.

Given that almost all of Europe is dominated by Google, the Czech Republic, together with Russia are in a unique position. In these countries, Google is leading in search. Instead of leading positions in local search engines.

Messages about the transition of dominance from Seznam to Google challenged the company Seznam. And it seems that she is quite right. The number provided by the web Analytics service Toplist based on traffic to sites Toplist. This method is not quite correct to calculate market share.

However, quickly circulated press release Toplist attracted a lot of attention to yourself. And he raised another interesting question: what allows Seznam and Yandex to be among the few who can stand up to Google in their regions?

Let's look at both search engines.

Seznam

First, let's look at the Czech giant. What makes it so special?

The reasons for the position of Seznam in the Czech Republic several. The first and very important is that Seznam is a local search engine and a lot of Czechs do prefer local products to foreign. That is, not only do they Seznam Google more, but, for example, would prefer to drink the local Kofola Cola is Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

This behavior is mostly common among the older generations. Young people are slowly switching to foreign products, which partly explains the observed increase in Google.

Another reason why Seznam long time popular Google, is that Google is somewhat disparagingly referred to increase its market share in the Czech Republic. The American giant had no office in Prague, and the Czechs, prefer local things, this is a mistake.

In order to truly capture the market, you should attend to be associated with local industries and be known. Google did not.

The third major reason for the dominance of Seznam is that the Czech language is a special language, which Google not quite managed to master. The Google results were just not good enough. This problem exists in Google and in other countries, and it partly led to the dominance of Yandex.

Map

Russian search engine Yandex is the second search engine in Europe, able to compete with Google. As in the case of Seznam, there are many different ways of calculating market share. Yandex is based on the data of Fund "Public opinion". According to FOM, 40% of Russian Internet users use Yandex. This means that the total daily audience of Yandex is more than 32 million users.

One of the problems with the calculation of numbers in relation to Google and Seznam in the Czech Republic stems from the fact that many residents of the Czech Republic are native speakers and use them for search. Yandex recognizes the difficulties with the definition of the search queries language.

In the case of Yandex it is also necessary to take into account the difference between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The latter is used in 73% of queries, so it would seem it is safe to say that most users of Yandex from Russia.

But this differs from Yandex, Seznam. Despite the fact that his native country is Russia, it is also popular in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. So the reasons for its popularity differ from Seznam.

Yandex himself believes that the popularity in these countries is based on a true account of local circumstances. Google in many cases, simply introducing their American practices in specific countries. This can sometimes work in the countries of Western Europe, but much less successfully in Eastern Europe.

Yandex believes that it is a big advantage over Google. They tailor services to local markets. This means that they also think that they can quickly adapt in new countries, which could be an indication that Yandex does not stop developing and thinking about expanding.
As stated by the chief editor of Yandex, Yelena Kolmanovskaya Finnish edition last year:

We believe that the boundaries of each service are defined by the language. We used to think we did yandex.ru both for Russian and for Russian-speaking users around the world. The latter is very significant, especially in countries of the former Soviet Union. But later, we launched yandex.ua, yandex.kz and yandex.by that is, we learned how to use languages other than Russian and, what is much more difficult, learned how to create different ranking algorithms (relevance) not only for specific countries and for specific regions and even cities. And we will continue to develop their skills.

The ability to adapt to the "new" country is exactly what makes Yandex is more popular than Google in Eastern Europe. This is also the conclusion we can make, looking at Seznam: local services are better able to adapt to what the local audience wants.

At the same time, Google is also still making efforts in order to better adapt to local conditions. If they do take this problem in their minds, the residents of Silicon valley can feel this Eastern European spirit and become closer to what Yandex and Seznam are able to do in Europe.

Alexander Amzin, Manager of Yandex for the media to recognize this:

local search engines, the same target as the global: find good answers to difficult questions. Over time, the level of knowledge required for the successful development of a search engine increases. "Global" results are losing their importance as the user expects a personalized and localized search results. Providing each user of such results is a big challenge for any search engine.

So the fate of the local search engines depend on localized results.

What can we learn from this? We can realize that local search engines still retain their value. But more importantly is that it is necessary to consider local aspects. Get closer to local users and find out what they want, if you want to be successful in Europe. Follow the European path.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru