Google co-founder targets Russian homeland

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Google dominates Internet searches across the world with a major exception of Russia, a gap which Russian-born co-founder Sergei Brin is keen to fill, he said in a newspaper interview.

"Now, we have incorporated far better morphology, which is very important in (the) Russian language," Brin said referring to a search technique which examines word construction.

Local Internet company and search engine Yandex receives about twice as many searches a day, Brin told Russian business newspaper Vedomosti during his first visit to Moscow in 4-1/2 years. "We think our search is better but it (Yandex) also has many talented people."

In February Yandex said it planned to float shares on Nasdaq later this year, an IPO which analysts estimated could value the company at around $3 billion (1.5 billion pounds).

Russia is an increasingly important market for Internet search engines which generate an estimated $40 billion a year from advertising worldwide. Internet user numbers are booming in Russia, which has a population of 142 million.