Russian and Ukrainian Search Engine Statistic
Popularity of search engines research in Russia and Ukraine
The goal of this work is to investigate situation with search engine market in Russia and Ukraine, determine most popular search engines and approximate share of traffic that each that engine is generated.
Introduction.
Search engines is the one of most important source of traffic to web site. Researches (1) show that:
- 75 to 85 percents of users use search engines to find sites
- 57% of users do searches every day
- 28% of users most probably use search engine when seek some product
- Search engines generate at least 7% of web sites traffic
That's why search engines are important factor in Internet advertisement and promotion and every business should take them in account.
Below I tried to observe situation with Russian and Ukrainian search engines to allow professionals working in the area of search engines optimization understand key players on market, who should be taken in account to reach Russian and Ukrainian audience.
SEARCH ENGINES IN RUSSIA
Comparative table that show share of different search engines on the Russian market. Data obtained from different sources, each of them are companies that provides traffic analyzing products and shown figures are global statistic based on all sites, used these services.
| Search Engine | LiveInternet.ru, Junuary 2004 | Market Share June 2004, Rax.ru | Spy Log, January 2004 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yandex.ru | 46.6% | 49.2% | 50% |
| Rambler.ru | 24.8% | 25.8% | 26,3% |
| 16.3% | 14.2% | 12% | |
| Aport.ru | 3.5% | 2.9% | 5.1% |
| Search.Mail.ru (Google engine) | 4.1% | 4.4% | 4.2% |
| MSN | N/D | 1.8% | N/D |
| Yahoo! | N/D | 1% | N/D |
Data above show that Russian market characterized by the powerful local players that control about 75% of market. Google, that also plays important role is more popular in Russian language interface.
Leader is Russian search engine Yandex.ru (www.yandex.ru) that holds about half of market. Position of MSN, Yahoo and other international engines beside Google are very week.
SEARCH ENGINES IN UKRAINE
Unfortunately there is strong lack of publicly open data about Ukrainian search engine market available. There is only one statistic was found during research, ProExt counting system, on the site SearchEngines.ru (shown in the 2-nd column of table below), reference
To provide more accurate representative additional calculation was done by myself (3-rd column of the table below):
| Search Engine | ProExt, June 2003 | Altima, June 2004 * |
|---|---|---|
| Yandex.ru | 63,5% | 34,10% |
| 12,4% | 22,50% | |
| Rambler.ru | 11,6% | 13,50% |
| Meta | 3,6% | 13,30% |
| Mail.ru | 3,3% | 3,00% |
| Aport.ru | 2,6% | 0,90% |
| MSN | 2,1% | 1,90% |
| Yahoo | 0,9% | 2,10% |
| Bigmir.net | N/D | 8,60% |
* Traffic from both search, rating and directory was counted if site provides all that services.
Data based on research of random 14 Ukrainian web sites, more representative extracts need to be done to reduce random factor.
Ukrainian market has several national search engine (Meta, Bigmir and few smaller) that while not leaders, play quite significant role and control 4-24 percents of market. There is quite big difference in the size between 2 sources that may be explained either big random factor or development of national search engines. In the defend of 2-nd version I can mention that Bigmir search engine was actively run just this year (Birmir is most popular rating and directory in Ukraine).
Data from both sources show that Yandex.ru is the leader as well as in Russia, Google take 2-nd place and Rambler.ru keep the 3-rd position.
Absolute digits
According own search engine administration statistic, next data was found (26.03.2004, Source - http://www.searchengines.ru/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8688), www.birmir.net :
| Search Engine | Visitors per day |
|---|---|
| Meta | 40 000 |
| BirMir | 63 000 |
| Rambler | 500 000 |
| Yandex | 1 600 000 |
Data above include all requests without dividing them to Russia, Ukraine and other countries.
Extrapolation of results give us total search engine visitors number about 3 millions daily, 750 - 800 thousands from each are Ukrainians, most of others Russians. This is rather rough picture, but I believe that proportions more or less correct.
References.
- Alexander Sadovsky "I think, than optimize". http://digits.ru/articles/promotion/se_promotion.html
- Searchengines.ru
- Rax.ru
- LiveInternet.ru
- SpyLog.ru
- BirMir.net