Yandex surpasses Microsoft in search engine rankings
February 8, 2013, 2:12 pm

Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex. [AP]

Yandex is the world’s fourth most popular search engine according to comScore, a leading internet analytics firm.

The Russian search engine has overtaken Microsoft’s Bing on the number of search queries in November and December last year.

According to comScore’s recent report, Microsoft sites processed 4.477 billion queries while Yandex processed 4.844 billion.

The data has come as a surprise to Western analysts, as the search engine is relatively unknown outside of Russia.

The company has an exclusive grasp on the Russian audience – an online community that is growing rapidly.

In October last year 60.7 per cent of the total internet traffic Yandex generated was from Russian territory.

Yandex has expanded its presence in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey.

In December 2007 Yandex entered the top 10 online services for the first time.

Top of comScore’s ranking is Google with a 65.2 per cent market share and 114.73 billion search queries.

Google’s closest rival Baidu, a Chinese search engine has only an 8.2 per cent market share and processes 14.5 billion queries.

Yahoo! came third with a 4.9 per cent market share and 8.63 billion queries.

Daria Chernyshova