Any of the Russian folks here care to comment on how useful they feel Yandex is? What is your preference for searching Russian pages? google.ru or yandex.com? Do you use one or the other exclusively? Or is yandex.com better for specific tasks only?

Yandex has always had better stemming. In Russian words have very many forms so you really-really need stemming. For that reason Yandex used to be immensely more useful if you have to find something.

Although I make very few searches in Russian these days so my opinion could be outdated. On the rare occasion I just use my default search everywhere - Google and it feels good enough nowadays, but again I use it rarely.

Technical merits alone are not sufficient, however, to evaluate Yandex. Not only the brand recognition is important, the "Russian Internet" (aka RuNet) is a community with its own sub-culture, celebrities etc. and one has to blend in. Both modern and classical cultural references take important part in what is worthy of people's attention and what is not.

Google has offices in Russia these days, and they are dialing up puns and cultural references as well. In one example Google's unit translation feature (e.g. "72 F in C") made a translation from meters to parrots, in reference to a child cartoon (see http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B3...). This cartoon was popular 30 years ago, when the current generation of movers and shakers were growing up. You have to do that kind of thing to gain credibility in RuNet. Google seems to be on the right track with that, but it's not clear to me they are willingly making this investment or rather a few employees did this on their own.

That would dwarf Quaero's US$306 million investment ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136759 ).

Would anyone mind explaining the "Ya" => backwards R dealie?

Written Russian language uses Cyrillic alphabet instead of Latin. That alphabet has 33 separate letters and one of them is for sound "Ya", it is spelled like "R" but backwards.

A mix of Russian and English in a brand-name for a Russian company was a popular thing to do, at least in the nineties. English part makes it cool and trendy while Russian part makes it less alien and more domesticated.

Ya is also the word "I" (or "me") in Russian, thus "Yandex" is a pun on "Index" (referring to "indexing" of internet).

Clever. I saw the visual pun since the shape of the Я contains the I. Very cool that it's also reflected semantically.