Type of site | Search engine Web browser |
|---|---|
| Available in | Russian |
| Owner | Rostelecom |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional, free |
| Launched | May 22, 2014[1] |
| Current status | publicly inactive, government use unclear[2] |
Sputnik is a search engine owned by Rostelecom, a Russian state-owned telecommunications company. It markets itself as an engine geared towards "local services".[3] At the end of the week of the launch, it was responsible for 0.01% of the search engine traffic in Russia, compared with 62% for Yandex and 28% for Google.[4] It went through the maximum in February 2016, with 11 thousands hits (compared with 121 million hits of Yandex). In January 2017, Sputnik was the 15th most popular search engine in Russia, with 1 / 32,000 times the hits of Yandex.
Despite the traction Sputnik first got during its release, the engine had two million visitors within the first week, but it was unable to compete with other search engines as time passed. In 2017, less than 1% of Russians used the engine, as they had a preference for Yandex and Google.[5] The launch of Sputnik was deemed unsuccessful by the President of Rostelecom, Mikhail Oseevsky. In order to help bring in users, Oseevsky wanted to make Sputnik the primary search engine for government agencies and businesses, but he got little to no support for this.[6]
Russia spent $20 million to create Sputnik. In 2015, Sputnik only brought in 136.6 million rubles in revenue. The company's lack of advertisement on the website and unpopularity took a toll on Sputnik.[7] In 2018, Rostelecom filed Sputnik LLC for bankruptcy, the reason being the company was unable to pay its debt. The base amount of the loan taken out was 3 million rubles, but with interest acquired overtime, it was 10.6 million rubles altogether.[8]
Rostelecom officially took down the search box from the website in 2020. The only thing that remains of the site for visitors is links to other projects created by Rostelecom. [9]
