Russia’s Yandex has just scored a bit of a coup – its search engine has become an option within the new version of Safari for iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, for users in Russia, Ukraine and Turkey.
This tidbit comes courtesy of app developers, who of course are now able to play with the preview of iOS 7 ahead of its consumer launch later this year. A Yandex spokesman subsequently confirmed the inclusion to me.
Here are tweets from devs in Russia…:
Яндекс в iOS7 http://t.co/wnJMn2bqWr—
ʎɐsʇɐd ʎdɯnɹƃ (@alexmak) June 11, 2013
… And Turkey:
iOS 7 supports yandex search on Safari
@YandexComTr @yandex @YandexDestek http://t.co/0zCwTU5Oj2—
Bahaeddin Nakiboglu (@bahaeddin) June 10, 2013
Turkey is a particularly big win for Yandex, which is pushing hard into that country. As for the company’s more traditional markets, the inclusion of Yandex search as an option in Safari could even be seen as belated – the company has a majority share of the Russian search market, and a few months ago it even ranked higher than Microsoft’s Bing for numbers of searches on a global basis.
Yandex has already been supplying data for local users of Apple Maps since September last year.
Around the world, Google is the default search option for Apple’s customers. Bing and Yahoo are also global options. Not many local players get to join that list – although China’s Baidu is a notable exception in that country.
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