We often need to search for fresh information about companies, services, products presented in such a huge country as Russia. And Internet is one of the powerful and accessible instrument of getting information. Russian Internet resources are developing fast and covering many categories of the information among which: national pharmaceutical manufacturers, foreign pharmaceutical companies, national distributors, pharmacies, professional magazines and newspapers etc. for effective search you should take into account some useful points.

• Where to search
• Language knowledge
• Reliability of sources

Universal search systems are well known and Russian pages could be found via Google or Alta Vista, but advanced search of the Russian sources could be facilitated by popular Russian search engines: Yandex, Rambler, and Aport. Also very useful could be universal catalogues like Ivan Susanin, specialized databases, medical and pharmaceutical databases, internet catalogues, guides and directories. Sometimes helpful sources could be local cities catalogues and directories as well as list of the Internet provider's clients.

Russian Web designers and programmers are usually well educated and produce interesting and modern Web Sites. But often, Web Sites are oriented to Russian audience and all information presented on Russian only. So, use your knowledge of Russian or ask for a service Russian speaking professional.

There is one more aspect- is technical one and concerns coding. Historically it is due to presentation of the Russian language in the Net using different coding. Coding is predetermined conformity between letters and their codes. Code is figure in fact and it is not necessarily corresponds number of the letter in the alphabet. There are figures (which are codes) that transferred through the Net and what letter will correspond to them decide your client program. So, for coding Russian language used the following codes:

Difficulties with coding are mainly involved with lack of correspondence with codes of the text received from the Net when you can see just meaningless set of Russian letters. Not all the time your new Hi-technology equipment can do what you want. So, if you'll print such a "text" (without knowledge of Russian) and send to your translator you'll loose your time. See sample below.

(By the way, the Russian part of our site is written using Win 1251 code.)

Concerning reliability of the sources - it is common problem and especially for CIS countries. You could find many interesting but not related to what you really wanted, plus faulty proposals and unrealistic promises. So, double check or ask experienced people for help.

• Russian Search engines:

Ukrainian internet resources for pharmaceutical sector are developing fast as well. And all things explained above are well applicable to Ukraine. Now it is become good practice for members of the pharmaceutical market to present relevant information about their companies or organizations on the Internet. So, Health authorities, distributors, manufacturers, pharmacies, professional journals and societies could be found on the net.

Ukrainian sources mainly presented on Ukrainian or Russian, but often English pages are available.

Also, there are some difficulties with Ukrainian codes due to differences in language (which sounds like Polish and other Slavic languages but written in Cyrillic like Russian), but we'll write about it later.

Sometimes it is difficult to find locally placed sources via popular search engines, so taking into account that some information is available on Russian language, Russian search engines could help in such search. And Ukrainian search engines like META or Uaportal quite effective in search on Ukrainian language

• Ukrainian Search engines and directory: