I can't convert Russian traffic and neither can my advertisers so no, to me it's not better. Anyone from Russia have any comment though?

Yandex isn't only Russian traffic..just not enough people know about [yandex.com...] ..which is in English..the more you use it and tell others ..the more their traffic becomes more worldwide ..the better you can convert the traffic ..

I'm in France ...not Russia, but I know a good number of Russians and Russian speakers on the net ..who told me that it was also in English...been using it for a while now ..

I've tried it in English - not bad at all. I just prefer ixquick at the moment.

I've had the yandex bot allowed on my sites for a long time, even though only a couple of my sites are likely to get traffic from Russia.

Only downside from my viewpoint is that they have very fragmented bot IP ranges - dozens of the things! Bad news because I cannot do reverse lookups on my server so have to white-list all the bots. On the other hand, they do seem fair in their bot management - better than google and msn, anyway.

For verticals I track their results are so much better, tons of .edu and .gov but you have to understand Google is smart boy in the game if they rank all the .edus and not the MFA sites then they will lose cash.

Re the original question.

IMO... The results are on a par with what Google used to produce and much better than what Google now produce.

$1.2bn should allow them to get a toe hold. I think they would be likely more focused than Bing. It'll be intersting to see how things develop.

Personally I like the results I see .... Google might be pushing too hard out of it's core and losing focus as the market pushes on it's earnings requirements.

It remains to be seen if word get's around outside Russia where it outruns Google. There's not exactly a deluge of reaction from what I'm seeing. But it's worth remembering that in some key areas of the globe such as China and Russia , Google's search product is not as popular. And things can morph quick.

Just had a look at Yandex and I quite like it.
It does seem to give me predominantly UK sites (unlike some of the other alternatives I've tried like DuckDuckGo). The interface looks a bit retro ( a nice way of saying about 5 years out of date) but I'm going to give it a bit more of a go.

I like Yandex enough I let them crawl, my placement was decent, the overall results decent.

It's kind of like retro-Google results, back when we actually like Google.

Wow...I am loving it..thanks for posting this...Yandex is another one that I like now after duckduckgo...

As for my sites it is doing great on bing, yandex, duckduckgo and to an extent on blekko. It was good for us on google but....it was...

I have a dilemma. I would like to let Yandex crawl and index my sites. However, a few years ago, I banned all incoming traffic (using .htaccess) from Russia because my logs showed suspicious hacking probes and possible scraping activities. And also, my intended audience aren't Russians, so traffic from there were not meaningful.

Yandex seems like a legitimate site and they are trying to establish a presence in the USA search engine space but yandex.com url shows that it is originating from Russia.

How can I give Yandex search engine an exemption and allow them to crawl and index my site? I don't have Yandex block of IP address.

Yandex was ..
IP Range: 77.88.0.1 - 77.88.63.254
CIDR: 77.88.0.0/18

may have been expanded now ?


there is other info in various places such as

[forumpostersunion.com ]

After looking all round their various sites, a lot of which are in Russian only, can't find any range info ..

Think I'll phone them tomorrow ( its late here and the offices will be shut ) and ask ..

[edited by: Leosghost at 6:14 pm (utc) on May 26, 2011]

The results are excellent. Just as good as Google. The UI is cleaner than Google. They just got to catch up with indexing new content quicker.

Russia are my 4th largest visitors, in fact we're in Moscow this next week for an exhibition.

I like their results since I do well in them, they're fast and the yellow reminds me of the original altavista!

A larger more upto date list of the IP ranges for Yandex here [botsvsbrowsers.com...] I forgot about these guys site..useful resource.:)

Leosghost,

Thank you. Your info was most helpful.

I see mixed results in Yandex for my various niches, but actually better than I would have expected. I did have an issue with them at one time hitting a client's 3000 or so product images *really* hard with their bot, and I banned them from that client's site, but maybe it's time to give them another shot.

No. Bing and Goog better.

Leosghost - a very useful site but for reference I think there are a few holes in the range they give. I ran rDNS checks last year and came up with 96 groups of bot IPs, mostly in 1's, 2's and 3's. Very messy!

I think there are a few holes in the range they give

Agreed :) But betwixt them and the spiders forum here ..covers most things and avoids one being glued to the logs..and yes I know that one can white list ( I hear the voices of incrediBill and tangor et al in the distance there ;-)..but if all your sites run white lists ..you never get to see new bots..unless you spend all day looking along the kerb for those who got kicked there ..

Inspite of all my monitor screens ..I actually prefer to be elsewhere than in front of them as much as possible.