• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 24, 2013

Arkady Borkovsky, CTO at Yandex Labs, and I met at a MediaPost OMMA event in San Francisco several years ago. He participated in a panel on global search. That's when I knew the Russian search market would never be the same.

Yandex reported that Q3 2013 earnings Thursday rose 40% to $315.9 million (RUB 10.2 billion). Income from operations rose 28% to 100.3 million (RUB 3.2 billion). The favorable results were partly due to the signing of an agreement with Apple to become one of the search options on mobile and desktop devices.

The Russian search engine grew its share of the Russian search market -- including mobile -- to about 62% the quarter, according to LiveInternet. Search engine results pages grew 26% from Q3 2012, and the number of advertisers grew 24% to 251,000, respectively.

The engine also signed a cooperation agreement with Mail.ru during the quarter. The Russian competitor incorporated the engine's advertising tools into its searches last July in exchange for profit sharing, which boosted its revenue.

Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh in the statement said the partnership with Mail.ru on the paid-search side was off to an extremely strong start, and had helped to increase the revenue growth rate in their ad network to 82% year-over-year.

App development during the quarter accelerated. Yandex also released a mobile app analytics tool called Metrica for Apps aimed at mobile app developers earlier this week. The English-language version is available for free. The company built the tool from the ground up because it wanted to learn about the audience and their use of the 25 apps that Yandex developed to date.

The analytics app aims to answer more complex questions, such as how many new users in London made an in-app purchase in the 1.01 version of the app on a Samsung device last week -- or how many crashes the new users of version 1.02 on Android tablets in Germany had in one week.

Other notable moves during the quarter include enhanced functionality for Yandex.Market with Cost Per Action advertising, completing the formation of the Yandex.Money joint venture with Sberbank in July; repurchase of 6.6 million shares in October as part of the previously announced 12 million share repurchase program; and the acquisition KinoPoisk, the largest and most comprehensive Russian-language Web site dedicated to movies, television shows and celebrities.

"Russian Flag" photo from Shutterstock.