Russia: Leading Russian search engine and mapping portal, Yandex, integrated Public Map, a digital map created by its users, into its service web and mobile portal. “The mapping service now includes detailed plans of almost 400 cities across Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Crowdsourcing allowed Yandex.Maps to add plans of such cities as Chita, Belgorod and Ulan-Ude, among many others,” said the company in a press release.
If the map for a city or town that the user is looking for is unavailable, the service can return user-generated data. In addition, many cities on Yandex.Maps feature both professional maps and user-generated plans. Users can just enable the Public map layer on the service to view a crowdsourced plan displayed over a city map.
On the Public Map volunteers can draw the map of their own city using detailed satellite imagery.
Yandex revenue in 2011 was more than USD 600 million and its share of Russian search market was slightly over 60 percent in Russia in the last quarter of 2011 (Google’s share was 25.5 percent).
Source: Yandex
