Yandex suffered a huge leak a few weeks ago, and a politically motivated former employee might’ve been behind it. This leak revealed a lot of the source code that the search engine platform runs on. It makes for dull reading as far as the average user is concerned, but in spite of the fact that this is the case it revealed some proprietary data that suggests that Yandex might have been stealing from Google.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Yandex has been using precisely 17,854 search ranking factors most of which appear to have been scraped from Google. This might sound like Yandex has been caught red handed, but the Russian search engine uses many of the same open source technologies as Google does which makes the likelihood of ill intent lower than might have been the case otherwise.
Still, this leak can shed a lot of light on the manner in which search engine optimization might function. SEO professionals will usually prefer Google over Yandex because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up giving them far superior results as well as visibility. However, the sharing of so much source code means that insights gleaned from the Yandex leak could very well prove fruitful in improving SEO performance on Google’s own search engine.
Search Engine Land did a deep dive in this data and found that there might actually be quite a few differences between Yandex and Google on this front. The web crawler along with the indexing algorithm appear to be quite distinct, so this leak might not reveal quite as much about Google as many had hoped.
The impact that this will have on Yandex is rather difficult to predict. The search engine is barely used outside of Russia, and even within Russia it struggles to compete with the likes of Google. This leak will likely make matters worse for the search engine and further deteriorate its consumer base and usefulness down the line.
Read next: Pakistan Might Block Wikipedia for Hurting Religious Sentiments
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Yandex has been using precisely 17,854 search ranking factors most of which appear to have been scraped from Google. This might sound like Yandex has been caught red handed, but the Russian search engine uses many of the same open source technologies as Google does which makes the likelihood of ill intent lower than might have been the case otherwise.
Still, this leak can shed a lot of light on the manner in which search engine optimization might function. SEO professionals will usually prefer Google over Yandex because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up giving them far superior results as well as visibility. However, the sharing of so much source code means that insights gleaned from the Yandex leak could very well prove fruitful in improving SEO performance on Google’s own search engine.
Search Engine Land did a deep dive in this data and found that there might actually be quite a few differences between Yandex and Google on this front. The web crawler along with the indexing algorithm appear to be quite distinct, so this leak might not reveal quite as much about Google as many had hoped.
The impact that this will have on Yandex is rather difficult to predict. The search engine is barely used outside of Russia, and even within Russia it struggles to compete with the likes of Google. This leak will likely make matters worse for the search engine and further deteriorate its consumer base and usefulness down the line.
Read next: Pakistan Might Block Wikipedia for Hurting Religious Sentiments
