I’d recommend waiting until volatility dies down after Yandex’s first few days of trading, but I’m convinced the long-term prospects for the company look good – at least as long as the political situation in Russia remains stable.

Late last month, I laid out 5 reasons to invest in Yandex stock, and now that Yandex’s IPO date (NASDAQ:YNDX) is upon us and shares are set to start trading today (on May 24, 2011), I’d like to offer a few more bullish arguments for the “Google of Russia.” Here are three MORE reasons to invest in the Yandex IPO:

1) More than Russia. Yandex dominates the Russian search market, but the search engine’s actually headquartered in The Netherlands. Yandex also operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and the company has an English-language version of its search engine (Yandex.com) in alpha testing right now.

While Yandex.com is nowhere near as fast or comprehensive as Google, it does have some interesting features. For example, when browsing through search results, you can hold down the CTRL key and hit the left or right arrows on your keyboard to move to the next or previous page of search results (just make sure your cursor isn’t in the search box to activate the function).

Currently, the Ukrainian version of Yandex (Yandex.ua) is the sixth most-visited site in the Ukraine, the fourth most-visited site in Kazakhstan (Yandex.kz) and the fifth most-visited site in Belarus (Yandex.by), according to stats from Alexa.com.

2) The Wild Wild Web. Just 43 percent of Russians currently have Internet access, per InternetWorldStats. Compare that with the more mature Internet market in the U.S. where 77 percent of the country has Web access.

To reach the maturity of the U.S. market, web access in Russia will need to rise nearly 80 percent in the coming years. That would exponentially drive up the number of pageviews served up by Yandex and increase the site’s advertiser base. Last quarter, Yandex served ads for 127,000 advertisers in Russia. That’s up more than 35 percent year-over-year, according IPO documents the company filed with the SEC.

3) Buyout by Google? One of the more interesting arguments for Yandex shares is that the company could be a potential acquisition target. Yandex owns more than 65 percent of the search market in Russia while Google controls just 20 percent of Runet searches. Russia’s booming online ad growth could bolster Google’s bottom line for years to come.

“If I were Google and looking to grow my Russian presence, that would be one of the options,” Uralsib analyst Konstantin Chernyshev told Reuters last week. If any company has deep enough pockets and a strong enough interest in acquiring Yandex, it would be Google (the same company that acquired social search engine Aardvark last year, and dropped $3.1 billion to buyout online advertising company DoubleClick in 2007).

If nothing else, we can take solace in the fact that Yandex is actually profitable. The company earned $134 million last year on revenue of $440 million. That fact alone gives it a boost over other high-profile tech IPOs like LinkedIn, which is forecasting a net loss in 2011. Tech may indeed be in another bubble, but companies like Yandex should be able to weather the turmoil when the bubble pops. It’s all about the rubles, after all, and Yandex has proven it can pull them in.

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Tags: Aardvark, DoubleClick, GOOG, LinkedIn, online advertising stocks, online stock, Yandex IPO, Yandex.ru, YNDX

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