It's not a malicious bias, but a bias nonetheless. We tend to show more love towards services we know of, use, hear about, or have a friend work at.
That Yandex chiefly targets the Russian, other Cyrillic, and Turkish markets limits its exposure to people who aren't in those markets. And some of it has to do with the kitchen-sink nature of what Yandex does (a lot of tech and some media), in that it's easy to mistake them to be similar to other such companies (Yahoo, Verizon, AOL -- incidentally they're now all the same) that have a similar spread of services, and yet they're not generally complimented in their tech achievements.
It technically means 'everything, whether necessary or not' [1][2], but the subtext and context I intended it in is that their range of services is forms an extremely wide spread, which could be mistaken for a lack of focus.
Yeah ok but you could say the same thing about google and they're doing well. You have yandex mail, web analytics, ads etc. How is that different from what google is going? In fact, I would say that yandex is trying to google's roadmap on how to conquer the world and see if they can pull it off in russia with the advantage that they currently have there.
- There are a lot of Googlers on HN, not so many Yandex-ers
- Google, in the general public's minds, is buoyed by positive mindshare that was generated a very, very long time ago (early-to-mid-2000s). Today's Google has appreciably changed from those days, and yet their likeability has mostly been unaffected.
- Google tried to make their lack of focus official by spinning off a corporate umbrella parent by the name 'Alphabet', like Philip Morris Companies the "tobacco" company renamed itself to 'Altria' in 2003 because at the time it owned 84% of Kraft Foods Inc., a large food and beverage company [1].
I maintain that to an American, Yandex is most analogous to Yahoo or AOL rather than Google, because Google is, as of writing, a company that makes money primarily from ads and is under transition to pursue higher revenue streams from business-to-business sources (like Google Cloud Services) more so than by brokering advertising. Whereas Yahoo or AOL are tech-media hybrids. I know Yahoo and AOL don't evoke such positive brand power anymore than, say, Google, but their structure I believe is more reflective of Yandex.
Rambler (rambler.ru) is more like Yahoo, not Yandex.
Like Google, Yandex is more service-oriented, Rambler is more media-oriented.
Rambler's numbers are also going down during many-many years, like Yahoo's.
It alsotruggling from crazy rotations of C managers each few years during last ~15 years
Like for Google, the main revenue stream for Yandex is also ads – they have >50% in market share in Russia, context ads network and RTB. With good Partner Network accepting websites.
From recent products, Yandex.Taxi is a huge success, also taking leadership on Russian market, beating Uber and Gett.
So with strong leadership in search, ads and young taxi markets in Russia it doesn't even close to Yahoo in comparison, it's definitely "Russian Google".
I agree with you, and add that to a russian, the leader is yandex, not google. Now, I'm not saying that it's all relative, google is objectively be a better company in most respects. But in terms of the mindshare that you talk about, yandex beats google in russia.
Not really "trying Google roadmap", because in some areas (search, maps, mail) Yandex was first. They were not as successful, however, due to the focus on Russian market, management and technology specifics and business climate.
it comes from the phrase "Everything but the Kitchen Sink." So "kitchen sink" becomes a shorthand reference for the above phrase, which itself means, "a whole bunch of random stuff all collected together"
That Yandex chiefly targets the Russian, other Cyrillic, and Turkish markets limits its exposure to people who aren't in those markets. And some of it has to do with the kitchen-sink nature of what Yandex does (a lot of tech and some media), in that it's easy to mistake them to be similar to other such companies (Yahoo, Verizon, AOL -- incidentally they're now all the same) that have a similar spread of services, and yet they're not generally complimented in their tech achievements.