14 DAY TRIAL // Yandex, the popular Russian search engine and portal, is expanding into its first non-Russian speaking country, Turkey. While geographically close to Russia, Turkey will be a unique challenge for Yandex which has flourished in its home market, but hasn't tried its luck elsewhere so far, until now.
Yandex opened an office in Istanbul and has a local team working on the Turkish version of the search engine and portal. It says many of the employees there are working on the site itself, as opposed to being a sales team exclusively, for example.
"It’s the first time we start offering web search services in a country where almost nobody speaks any Russian," says Arkady Volozh, Yandex CEO.
"We have considered countries with a well-developed internet market, a growing web user audience and a lot of local language content. Turkey was a clear first choice," he said.
"Instead of just localizing our services for this country, we custom-built an entirely new product – tailored specifically to web users in Turkey," he added.
The Turkish version of the site, at Yandex.com.tr, is already live and looks very similar to the Russian one. There are several layout changes indicating that there was more work than a simple translation being carried out.
Turkey boasts quite a large internet market, there are some 35 million internet users there, a 45 adoption rate.
Yandex boasts that the search engine is designed specifically for the Turkish language and takes into account the various local nuances to surface the best results. That's the same strategy it applied in Russia, with huge success.
That said, Russia is one of the few global internet markets where local players tend to do better, partly because of government 'encouragement,' partly because users prefer 'home made' products.
Yandex is also available in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, all Russian-speaking countries and all part of the Soviet block. It remains to be seen how Yandex fares in a completely foreign country. It also looks like Yandex is not done expanding and there are hints that it's launching in other new markets.