This record is not so simple. In Russia, disagree with that data. And, in the first place, Yandex and Mail.Ru. They argue that the data are incorrect. No one can understand how English-speaking sites may be more audience than Russian-speaking sites? This is nonsense. The answer is simple. Comscore measure anglophone or foreign Runet users. And also, Comscore uses to measure "delayed toolbar", and saw no change.

Yandex is targeted on Cyrillic segment of Internet and thus can ignore English-language sites at all (it can be explained by rather poor knowledge of English language by average Russian guy). It provides quite wide list of services. Personally I prefer google but I use Yandex for some map searches and searches along internet-shops, though their general search engine is also not that bad at all.

Yap, just before March 2008 Yandex had been only indexing sites in Cyrillic languages.

Y is great at services – mail, gourgeous maps, unlimited flickr-styled photosharing, unlimited filesharing with 750mb per file, dictionaries, so on. And it's not that perfect at search (my own taste). Google search in Russian seems more relevant. Heard someone say, if you want to find something, search with Google, if you want to buy something , use Yandex.

Yandex results are very good, but as a policy they index only sites in Russian or sites that prove that they are related to Russia or its culture.

They want to make the best search engine for Russian sites, because they know that Google is the best for everything else.

They also have other services – dictionaries, maps, money transfer, etc. It's a bit like the Russian Yahoo, but with much less clutter.

Yandex already index 1 billion sites outside of .ru domain http://blog.quintura.com/2008/04/07/will-yandex-take-on-google/
I think it first indexes those sites that are linked to .ru sites

In soviet russia search engine finds you.

They also have very nice blog search engine http://blogs.yandex.ru/
Much better than Google has

In soviet russia search engine searches you.

i live in russia and my job is freelance remote and local technical users support (pc and lan service, audit, network security, etc.)
as to myself i hate yandex.ru, rambler.ru, especially mail.ru and other as i call them trash-services. there are a lot of useless and annoying adds, slow slow slow page loading and viruses which can be deleivered to you via disgusting "mail.ru agent" software. besides that i remember several people which wanted to change mail.ru on smth because all their mail messages suddenly disappeared and they simply didnt know what service to choose (i had helped them to register gmail.com accounts and later they were happy...)
the first problem is that mail.ru trash-service has a great addvertising in our country and it tryes to seem extremly simple and "standart de facto".
the second one is that russian people (most of them) cant beleive in smth good, smth that contain no adds, smth fast and useful for free... the reason is rather phylosophical, they cant beleive in really good things for free and thats all.
yandex.ru doesnt search better than google and thats the true fact (besides some cases connected with local services, but there are very small quantity of services working via internet in russia). maps service in google is also much better than any russian one. so when i search adress i use google.
one of my small but very important missions is to show to russian users good, clean and free things. so i learn all my new clients gmail and google apps (already registered several russian companies in google apps domains) and allways some time later they tell me: "alex, thank you thats great thing! we dont know how we worked without it in past..."
thus one more reason: very low quantity of information on russian market!
russian users mostly didnt hear about google, zoho, etc. at all, some of them suspect them to be a "hacker tools" or smth like that, and just single users use google (gmail with gtalk, google maps and very seldom google docs...).

Hadto
Roses are red
Violets are blue
In soviet russia
Poems write you!

I am not a Russian. However, I think the ComScore's methodology for gathering the statistics was expensive and not conventional.

ComScore claimed "comScore determines the size and characteristics of the total online population via a continuous survey spanning tens of thousands of persons selected randomly during the course of a year. Respondents are asked a variety of questions about their Internet use, as well as descriptive information about themselves and their households."

Who got recruited? Government officers? business people? White collars?
There are so many groups of people would simply ignore such recruitment.

ComScore's methodology may be good enough for traditional marketing research for traditional products, however, for researching search market shares, the single most important factor is how many queries to each search engine, and there is a conventional way to gather the data: Almost all search queries go through ISP, the researcher may just pay a few ISPs to aggregate the search queries and get the distributions.

If ComScore did not do so, I would say the data presented by it is quite misleading.

Yandex can get more relevant searching results for cyrillic queries, cause it more adapted to russian morphology.
As for me i preffer Google and its hacks.

It might be worth checking the free report about multilingual search engine usage available at http://www.multilingual-search.com/global-search-report-2007-released-free-pdf/15/10/2007
it includes Russia.
I helped with the Estonia report btw

Yandex always stand itself like Russian engine (now also Ukrainian, and probably other cyrillic countries would have self localisations too).
Russian engine orient on average russian user, who mostly don't know english very well or at all. As a result, when such average user search "google blogoscoped", he find many russian (translated, narrated) topics from Google Blogoscoped. And this is what he want.
When he go to Google, and do the same, he find Blogoscoped.com itself, but he don't know english and such information for him is useless.

And this is why i always use Yandex when i want to find russian texts about something. As you can see...
only russian (exlude imdb)
http://www.yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=There.Will.Be.Blood
some russion and some english
http://www.google.ru/search?hl=ru&q=There.Will.Be.Blood
only english
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=There.Will.Be.Blood

For me, this is good competion opportunity for local search engines, and i hope Yandex don't loose it.

I do easily believe yandex outperforms Google here… What I'm really wondered is numbers: from what I've seen (can't recall exact URLs though) before yandex used to be more popular before.

Yandex is a de-facto standard here, it's widely advertised (unlike Google) and accepted by many new users. Not all Google products and services have good translation to Russian so far and that's one of the reasons… Besides, yandex is far longer on this marker (runet search) than google, so people got used to it.

P.S.: I do use google as my default search engine as my interests mostly lie within content in english :)

1) Google does support the Russian morphology and does it quite well.
2) Yet, most Russians prefer Yandex. The indirect statistics obtained by counting the traffic from Google and Yandex says that Google has about 20% of the Russian market:
http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/searches.html?slice=ru;period=month

Without slice=ru, liveinternet gives numbers that are close to ComScore's data: yandex: 44%, google: 31%.

Hi, Phil
look at the data which are the most trusted in Russia
http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/searches.html?period=month
It is the amount of traffic to Russian web sites generated by search engines
The same data but for Russian web sites visited by users with Russian ips
http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/searches.html?slice=ru;period=month