Comparative Analysis of Yandex and Google Search Engines

Abstract

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of algorithms and information retrieval performance of two search engines: Yandex and Google in the Russian language. Comparing two search engines is usually done with user satisfaction studies and market share measures in addition to the basic comparison measures. Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia, while Google is the most popular search engine in the world and well known for the quality of the results. The most common opinion about the reason for the popularity of Yandex s that it retrieves better quality results specifically in the Russian language. The comparison of the performance of some search engines in the English language has been studied mostly by comparing the relevancy of the results retrieved. There is a number of studies having been done on understanding the mathematical aspects of Google’s algorithm and the ranking factors. No studies on comparing algorithms and the quality of retrieved results of Yandex and Google have been done. This study is the comparison of the algorithms and the retrieved results of Yandex and Google search engines in the Russian language. The comparison can be divided in three main tasks, description of web information retrieval, comparison of PageRank and MatrixNet algorithms, and the comparison of the quality of the retrieved results for selected queries. The main contributions of this thesis are the comparison of the ranking methods of both of the search engines, the quality of the results, and the main ranking factors of Yandex and Google.