Google competitors in Europe: Yandex and Seznam

A few weeks ago there was a sudden uproar in the Czech online industry. Google allegedly bypassed the search engine Seznam by market share.



Given that Google dominates almost all of Europe, the Czech Republic, together with Russia, is in an exceptional position. In these countries, Google does not lead in the search. Instead, the leading position occupied by local search engines.



Messages about the transition of dominance from Seznam to Google were challenged by Seznam itself. And it seems that she is quite right. The numbers provided by the Toplist web analytics service are based on traffic coming to the Toplist sites. This method is not quite correct for calculating market shares.

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However, the quickly circulated Toplist press release allowed the company to attract much attention to itself. And he raised another interesting question: what allows Seznam and Yandex to be among the few who can resist 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?



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



This behavior is mostly common among the older generations. Young people are slowly moving to foreign products, which partly explains the observed growth of Google.



Another reason why Seznam has been popular for a long time over Google is that Google was somewhat scornful of increasing its market share in the Czech Republic. The American giant did not have an office in Prague, and for Czechs who prefer local things, this is a mistake.



In order to truly capture the market, you must be present in it, be associated with local industries and be known. Google did not.



The third main reason for the dominance of Seznam is that the Czech language is a special language that Google did not quite manage to master. Google issuance was simply not good enough. Google has this problem in other countries, and it has partly led to the dominance of Yandex.

Yandex

Russian search engine Yandex is the second search engine in Europe that can compete with Google. As with Seznam, there are many different ways to calculate market shares. Yandex itself is based on data from the Public Opinion Foundation. According to the POF, 40% of Russian Internet users use Yandex. This means that the total daily audience of Yandex has 32 million users.



One of the problems of calculating numbers for Seznam and Google in the Czech Republic is that many Czechs are speakers of other languages ​​and use them to search. Yandex recognizes the difficulty in determining the language of search queries.



In the case of Yandex, one must also take into account the difference between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The latter is used in 73% of requests, so it would seem to be safe to say that the majority of Yandex users are from Russia.



But in this Yandex is different from Seznam. Although Russia is his home country, he is also popular in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Therefore, the reasons for its popularity are different from Seznam.



Yandex itself believes that popularity in these countries is based on real taking into account local specifics. Google, in many cases, simply introduces its American methods of work in specific countries. This can sometimes work in Western European countries, but is much less successful in Eastern European countries.



Yandex believes that this is his great advantage over Google. They adapt services for local markets. This means that they also think that they can quickly adapt to new countries, which may be an indication that Yandex is not stopping development and is thinking of even greater expansion.



As stated by the chief editor of Yandex Elena Kolmanovskaya Finnish edition last year:

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

The ability to adapt to a “new” country is exactly what makes Yandex more popular with Google in Eastern Europe. We can make the same conclusion looking at Seznam: local services can better adapt to what the local audience wants.



At the same time, Google is also making efforts to better adapt to local conditions. If they really take their minds with this problem, then the residents of Silicon Valley will be able to feel this Eastern European spirit and get closer to what Yandex and Seznam can do in Europe.



Alexander Amzin, Yandex’s media relations manager, admits this:

Local search engines have the same goal as global ones: to find good answers to complex questions. Over time, the level of knowledge necessary for the successful development of a search engine increases. “Global” results lose their meaning as the user expects personalized and localized search results. Providing each user with such results is a big challenge for any search engine.

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



What can we learn from this? We can realize that local search engines still retain their value. But more importantly, 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.