
The Biggest Tech IPO of 2008 Is Coming Out of Russia: Search Engine Yandex to Raise Up To $2 Billion - nickb
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/20/the-biggest-tech-ipo-of-2008-is-coming-out-of-russia-search-engine-yandex-to-raise-up-to-2-billion/
======
kmt
Any of the Russian folks here care to comment on how useful they feel Yandex
is? What is your preference for searching Russian pages? google.ru or
yandex.com? Do you use one or the other exclusively? Or is yandex.com better
for specific tasks only?

~~~
DenisM
Yandex has always had better stemming. In Russian words have very many forms
so you really-really need stemming. For that reason Yandex used to be
immensely more useful if you have to find something.

Although I make very few searches in Russian these days so my opinion could be
outdated. On the rare occasion I just use my default search everywhere -
Google and it feels good enough nowadays, but again I use it rarely.

Technical merits alone are not sufficient, however, to evaluate Yandex. Not
only the brand recognition is important, the "Russian Internet" (aka RuNet) is
a community with its own sub-culture, celebrities etc. and one has to blend
in. Both modern and classical cultural references take important part in what
is worthy of people's attention and what is not.

Google has offices in Russia these days, and they are dialing up puns and
cultural references as well. In one example Google's unit translation feature
(e.g. "72 F in C") made a translation from meters to parrots, in reference to
a child cartoon (see
[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B3...](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%B9#Noun)).
This cartoon was popular 30 years ago, when the current generation of movers
and shakers were growing up. You have to do that kind of thing to gain
credibility in RuNet. Google seems to be on the right track with that, but
it's not clear to me they are willingly making this investment or rather a few
employees did this on their own.

------
xirium
That would dwarf Quaero's US$306 million investment (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136759> ).

------
aston
Would anyone mind explaining the "Ya" => backwards R dealie?

~~~
DenisM
Written Russian language uses Cyrillic alphabet instead of Latin. That
alphabet has 33 separate letters and one of them is for sound "Ya", it is
spelled like "R" but backwards.

A mix of Russian and English in a brand-name for a Russian company was a
popular thing to do, at least in the nineties. English part makes it cool and
trendy while Russian part makes it less alien and more domesticated.

Ya is also the word "I" (or "me") in Russian, thus "Yandex" is a pun on
"Index" (referring to "indexing" of internet).

~~~
aston
Clever. I saw the visual pun since the shape of the Я contains the I. Very
cool that it's also reflected semantically.

