PRESS: Rostelecom said to retarget unpopular search engine Sputnik

MOSCOW, May 12 (PRIME) -- Russian state-controlled telecom operator Rostelecom may retarget its unpopular search engine Sputnik, launched in 2014, although its closure looks unlikely thanks to its technological values, business daily Vedomosti reported on Friday, quoting several sources close to the company.

Rostelecom spokesman Andrei Polyakov confirmed that plans of Sputnik’s development are being revised. “We need to introduce amendments in tune with reality,” he said.

One of the sources said Sputnik was a success as a technical project, but not as a popular search engine. According to LiveInternet, its share stood at below 1% in April, as compared to 54% held by Yandex, 40.8% of Google, and 4.4% of Mail.Ru.

A person close to Rostelecom’s management said one of the options is to retarget Sputnik to the tasks linked to big data calculations. There is still no final understanding of the project’s future, and Rostelecom will make a decision by June 1.

The operator will unlikely shut down the project, which was initially promoted as a national search engine, a source said.

Sputnik’s future is in the hands of Rostelecom’s new head Mikhail Oseyevsky, who is now scrutinizing all assets, and any disputable project can face any decision. Sputnik may survive, because it has own technologies and valid contracts, one of the sources said. Sputnik’s value is in its machine learning algorithms and work with big unstructured data.

Rostelecom could use the search engine’s technologies in the infrastructure of the electronic government to monitor audience outflow, as one of the people said.

Finam Chairman Vladislav Kochetkov said that entering a market which had been split between Internet giants Yandex and Google a long time ago without a competitive advantage, is very hard.

Specifics of the Internet business say that it is easier to create a new segment and dominate it, than try to squeeze leaders out of an existing field. For example, search engine Bing of Microsoft did not succeed, although the U.S. company has invested in it much more than Rostelecom in Sputnik.

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