Yakov at Quintura has a post today discussing Russian search engine Yandex and their expansion outside of the Russian language. Currently Yandex returns 90% Russian domain results (.ru) and 10% other results which include the .com domain. Yakov also notes that 15% of its searches are in a language other than Russian and that Yandex could capture that revenue by allowing more non-Russian searches to take place.

I am wondering if we will see local search engines outside the U.S. enter the U.S. market by going after the U.S. markets where a specific language is spoken. For example, in parts of Brooklyn, Russian is the most popular language. Should Yandex market to this demographic? What about Spanish? Or French, German, Japanese, etc.

While this would be a niche market to target, it could broaden the take rate for these search engines which operate outside the U.S. And these marketing opportunities could push past just search into mail, video, news, etc. Check out my exclusive interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich for more information about how Yandex works and their business model.