I know many people in Russia use Yandex quite a lot. I actually prefer Yandex to Google when I search for something in Russian. When I needs something in English I uses Google or Yahoo though. By the way Yandex has a lightweight home page which I actually like more than Google's: http://ya.ru.

There are only for links on this page: Upper left: make yandex a start page. Upper right: log into mail. Lower left: yandex.ru - heavy page with news and links to other services. Lower right: page designer company.

Their web email client is very lightweight and fast. It works faster than GMail on my 5 years old laptop which is nice. Other services are Ok, too.

Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia with more than 50% market share. It comes as a default search engine in Opera Mini and as a Speed Dial engine in Opera Desktop (which has about 20% market share in Russia).

And they also provide an 'optimized' version of Firefox 3 from their own site (toolbar, home page, and default search engine). When Firefox 3 was released this optimized version was heavily advertised on Russian internet and I know quite a few people who use that.

And no, I'm not a Yandex employee. I don't even live in Russia now. I just thought it might be a good idea to tell about because there not that many people who can read Russian