Discussion of the deal by Rambler-Media with Google has become one of the most popular topics recently. Naturally, the deal is much rumored about. They began talking about Rambler being sold out and about disappearance of one of most popular systems of traffic counting Top 100 and so forth. So what has happened in reality?    

Formally, the Rambler-Media Holding has not been sold to anyone. The outcome of the deal in question is that Google has only got the system of internet advertising named “Begoon” (fittingly, Runner) 50.1% of which stock belonged to Rambler. The rest 49.9% are to be bought from Finam Holding by Google again. That means that Rambler is just leaving the Russian market of internet advertising. This part of the deal concluded does not matter much for the end users, as it makes no difference who exactly will be managing placement of commercials on the websites.  

As for the other part of the deal that is mentioned separately in the agreement, it really means that the “landscape of the Russian Internet is changing” (an expression by Yandex representatives). This is about information that Rambler will be using now the Google searching technology for its Russian-language internet resources. One should note that although Yandex was not formally interested in the deal discussed, it gave a comment in its corporate blog just a few hours after it was concluded, and stressed exactly this aspect of the question.   

So far we have had the situation where three searching engines – Yandex, Rambler and Google - dominated in Russia and only one of them was foreign. The largest portal of Mail.ru used the Yandex technologies, while other systems could be just discarded. Very few countries are able to boast of one’s own all-national searching engine – besides the US it’s only about China and South Korea. And we had the two ones! So the regrets by Yandex that remains alone now seem quite reasonable. Besides, the Yandex technologies are different from those by Google and in a number of cases they give more relevant results (this is, of course, about searching in Russian).  

There is a circumstance that makes one be concerned about Yandex too. The searching traffic itself does not matter much, as finally the destinies of the companies are decided by advertisers. And now Yandex will have to struggle to win them being competed not by Rambler, but by a worldwide company, which sometimes even can get better hand of Microsoft itself. For example, in Ukraine Google is dominating among searching engines in the Russian language and the Ukrainian portals are going for Google search in mass. It would be a pity if we lost the national searching engine, pity not out of principle, but because Yandex is really better in many aspects. 

Here I would only warn Yandex against hasty steps: it is known that they have been experimenting lately with searching technologies, and that’s not always a success with them. In case they lose also users, that would be curtains definitely.