Mail.ru abandons Google, goes it alone with search engine

Russian internet giant Mail.ru has announced that it’s officially dropping Google and will now handle all search queries made by Search Mail.Ru users.

The search engine is the third largest in Russia and lays claim to some 39.5-million monthly users worldwide, per comScore figures.

Mail.ru says that it’s been working on the search engine for the past few years, during which the search engine development team expanded from 15 to 200 professionals. Over the last six months, it says, “index volume has grown from 5 to 10 billion documents, and a few thousands of servers have been dedicated to query processing”.

The move is hardly unexpected, with the group announcing its intentions to sever search ties with Google as early as November 2012.

“It’s remarkable that there are fewer countries with their own search engines today than those with their own space program. Only five countries (the United States, Russia, Czech Republic, China and South Korea) can boast successful search engines, while space exploration activities are regularly performed by nine countries,” says Dmitry Grishin, Co-Founder and CEO of Mail.Ru Group “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.”

Mail.ru, which is part owned by emerging markets media and internet giant Naspers, operates two of the three largest Russian language online social networking sites (Odnoklassniki and My World), instant messaging networks in Mail.Ru Agent and ICQ, the county’s leading email service and largest Internet portal Mail.ru, as well as its largest online games platform.

While the company is dominant in Russia, it has looked to expand internationally with the My.com property, although that appears to have been quiet since its launch in October last year. It also launched a socially integrated web browser it called Amigo around the same time.