Russian Internet company Mail.ru Group released an official announcement that they will be handling all queries made by Search Mail.ru users from here on out. According to TheNextWeb.com, Google previously powered 60 percent of the searches performed on Search Mail.ru, after the company split ways with Russian search engine Yandex in August 2010.
While Mail.ru says its current share of Russian-language Internet market search queries is less than 9 percent, TheNextWeb reports that Mail.ru Group sites reach approximately 86 percent of Russian Internet users each month.
The announcement from Mail.ru says the company has spent the last few years growing its search engine development staff from 15 to 200 employees to develop its own search engine. Mail.ru claims to have increased its search index volume from five to ten billion documents during the last six months, with thousands of servers now dedicated to query processing.
“Development of a competitive search engine is an ambitious goal, but it’s essential that our own search engine enables us to be more flexible and that now we are able to provide our service with higher search quality,” says Mail.Ru Group co-founder and CEO Dmitry Grishin.
With 39.5 million monthly users worldwide, Search Mail.Ru is the third largest search engine in the Russian-speaking Internet market. Mail.ru Group was founded in 1998 and offers a broad supply of Internet tools, from a browser application to social networks, IM services and games.