Although we all expect to see Google's search engine on the first place in every country of the world, the Mountain View-based company has encountered tough competition in some regions. It's already known the fact that the Chinese market refused Google's evolution so Baidu is still the local king of search. But what's more interesting is that in Russia, Google's sites are the second most popular because the leader position was taken by Yandex, a local search page.

According to statistics provided by comScore, Yandex has no less than 47.4 share of the total searches while Google comes in second with 31.2. However, some people believe that Google is far better than Yandex but, the local users still have more trust in their local technology.

"alexsupra," a Google Blogoscoped reader who said that he lives in Russia, explained that lots of Russians didn't even hear about Google so it's impossible for the Mountain View company to reach the local market unless it starts a powerful advertising campaign.

"Russian users mostly didn't hear about Google, Zoho, etc. At all, some of them suspect them to be "hacker tools" or smth like that, and just single users use Google (Gmail with Gtalk, Google maps and very seldom Google Docs...)," he wrote. "Russian people (most of them) can't believe in smth good, smth that contain no adds, smth fast and useful for free... the reason is rather phylosophical, they can't beleive in really good things for free and that's all."

Another explanation for the Yandex domination would be the fact that the Russian search engine was previously focused on Cyrillic characters so searching for a Russian page may provide better results than Google. However, Yandex has begun indexing non-Russian page in March and, according to its blog (translated by the people of Quintura), it has already indexed approximately 1 billion pages.