TO GOOGLE WITH LOVE

A very big small company puts Google in second place.

The Google of Russia is Yandex, and it is preparing for an IPO on Nasdaq in the fall with the hopes of raising $1.5 billion to $2 billion, as reported by Reuters. That would give the company a $5 billion valuation (115.5 Billion rubles).

Yandex was founded 15 years ago, and the last funding was only $5.3 million back in 2000, according to Quintra’s CEO Yakov Sadchikov (Quintura is a smaller search engine also based in Russia). If that is all the company raised, it will be a huge payday for investors ru-Net Holdings, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, and Tiger Technologies.

Yandex has a bigger search market share in Russia than Google. It's the biggest site in Russia overall.

In Europe it's the No. 3 search engine, outpacingYahoo and Microsoft . Globally, it's in the top ten.

Its revenues, though, are not that large, considering its ranking. In 2007 it reported only $167 million in revenues (3,857,700,000 rubles), which was a 130 percent increase from 2006. Founders Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich still run the company.