mail.ru starts using Yandex search

Mail.ru is the 5th popular search engine in Russia with the market share of 0.21% and audience of 19.5 million people as of December 2022, according to Statcounter. Mail.ru belongs to VK group. The decision to let go of their search engine in favor of Yandex is a small part of a big deal between VK group and Yandex that has been happening from April to September of 2022.

Now the mail.ru’s search is serviced by Yandex, representatives of the company say mail.ru’s search technologies will continue to be used within their products, such as VK, VK Music, Mail.ru cloud and e-mailing services, etc. The update is related to the new general strategy of VK with an emphasis on the development of content services.

Previously VK used Google search from 2004 to 2006 and later, from 2010-2013. In the years 2007-2009 they used Yandex search. Since 2013 the company switched to their own technologies but considered giving it up eventually. Mail.ru search was used primarily for tasks within the VK ecosystem, for anything else the users would go to Yandex and Google.