Ads from Google. Search engine begins to advertise on Russian net.

A year and a half after the opening of its Moscow office, Google has begun to advertise its search engine on the Russian Internet. Google's Russian portal has still not entered the top three sites on the Russian Internet. For now, experts are describing Google's advertising campaign as modest, and several expect that, by autumn, Google will have started something more serious.

Google has begun an advertising campaign on the Russian Internet. On Monday, banners from Google began to appear on popular sites including gazeta.ru, gismeteo.ru, and travel.ru. Vladimir Dolgov, head of Google's Russian office, confirmed that an advertising campaign on Russian sites was underway, but declined to discuss it in detail.

When Google opened its Moscow office at the beginning of 2006, everybody expected a mass advertising campaign for the portal. At different times, the most popular portals on the Russian Internet - Yandex, Mail.ru and Rambler (the so-called "big three") even advertised their services on television.

Back then, Google chose not to follow their example, and now, according to popularity ratings from Alexa.com, it is in the fourth position, behind the "big-three". Worldwide, however, Google has a leading position for usage. According to data from analysts at comScore, in April 2007, Google's sites were visited by 528 million individual users - slightly more than Microsoft, with 527 million.

Arkadiy Volozh, the General Director of the Russian Internet's biggest search engine, Yandex, says that services requiring a user-base of several million could not rely on online advertising to reach a larger audience. Arsen Revasov, General Director of the IMHO VI advertising agency, describes Google's advertising as "an imitation of a campaign". He thinks that only television advertising can help the company muscle in on the "big three". Lev Gleizer, from AdWatch, suggests that Google's project is only a trial run. He expects that Google will launch a much broader campaign in autumn.

Normally, Google does not advertise itself - although there have been several exceptions to that rule. In 2005, for example, the search engine ran a promotional campaign in the bars of Kansas and, in Korea, double-decker buses did the rounds of Seoul's college campuses, giving students the chance to test Google and sign up for Gmail accounts.

Dmitriy Grishin, the General Director of Mail.ru, suggests that Google has been forced to advertise by the strong competition on the Russian Internet. "There are such strong players on the Russian market, that Google has practically for the first time been forced to back down from its principal stance - not to use direct advertising", he said via the company's press service.