Russia's largest search engine Yandex launched on Wednesday a .com version of its service as it seeks to compete with Google, a Russian business daily said.

The Vedomosti daily quoted Yandex spokesman Ochir Manjikov as saying the search engine had launched a test version of the separate domain - yandex.com - to run alongside the existing yandex.ru.

The chairman of the Russian investment holding Finam, Vladislav Kochetkov, told Vedomosti the launch of Yandex's international search engine is a turning point in the history of the Russian Internet.

According to the international media research company comScore, in 2009 Yandex took 7th place in the top-10 of the world's most popular search engines after such familiar names as Google, Yahoo and China's Baidu.

The founder of the another web search engine, nigma.ru, Viktor Lavrenko told Vedomosti Yandex would have to register 20 billion pages and advertise its services abroad to compete on a global scale. He was confident Yandex would be able to meet the challenge if it desired.

However, Mahjikov said in response that Yandex would not advertize its services abroad as it was still a web search engine for primarily Russian users.

MOSCOW, May 19 (RIA Novosti)