Yandex (Russian: Яндекс) is a Russian Internet company which operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 60% market share in that country.[3] It also develops a number of Internet-based services and products. Yandex ranked as the 4th largest search engine worldwide, based on information from Comscore.com, with more than 150 million searches per day as of April 2012, and more than 50.5 million visitors (all company's services) daily as of February 2013.[4] The company's mission is to provide answers to any questions users have or think about (explicit or implicit).[5] Yandex also has a very large presence in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, holding nearly third of all searches in each country's individual market and nearly a half (43%) of all searches in Belarus.[6]

The Yandex.ru home page has been rated as the most popular website in Russia.[7] Yandex attracts more than 56 million users from all over the world.[8] The web site also operates in Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine and Turkey.[9] Another company, Yandex Labs, is a wholly owned division of Yandex that is located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

According to research studies conducted by TNS, FOM, and Comcon, Yandex[10] is the largest resource and largest search engine in the Russian Internet market, based on audience reach. Yandex currently has a market share of over 60%[3] in Russia's search engine market by traffic [11]

Yandex' main competitors on the Russian market are Google, Mail.ru and Rambler. Yandex is therefore one of the national non-English-language search engines (with, among others, Naver, Seznam.cz and Baidu) that pose as significant competitors for Google in their respective countries.

According to Yandex marketing, one of its biggest advantages for Russian-language users has the ability to recognize the Russian inflection in search queries.[12]

Yandex's roots trace back to 1990, when Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky founded the company Arkadia, which developed MS-DOS software for use in patents and goods classification. Their software featured a full-text search with Russian morphology support. In 1993 Arkadia became a subdivision of Comptek International, another company founded by Volozh in 1989. In 1993-1996 the company continued developing its search technologies and released software for searching through the Bible and Russian classical literature.[13]

In 1993 Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, friends since their school days and by then working together to develop search software,[14] invented the word "Yandex" to describe their search technologies. The name initially stood for "Yet Another iNDEXer".[15] The Russian word "Я" ("Ya") corresponds to the English personal pronoun "I", making "Яndex" a bilingual pun on "index". Another pun is based on the yin and yang contrast (Russian: инь - индекс, ян - яндекс).

The search engine yandex.ru was launched on September 23, 1997 and was publicly presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. Initially the search engine was developed by Comptek. In 2000 Yandex was incorporated as a standalone company by Arkady Volozh.[15]

Yandex's revenue comes primarily from online advertisement. In 1998 Yandex launched contextual advertisement on its search engine. In 2001 it launched the Yandex.Direct advertisement network.[15] Yandex LLC became profitable in November 2002. In 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17M, which was 10 times greater than the company's revenue just two years earlier. The net income of the company in 2004 constituted $7M. In June 2006, the weekly revenue of Yandex.Direct context ads system exceeded $1M. All of Yandex's accounting measures have been audited by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu since 1999.

In September 2005 Yandex opened an office in the Ukraine[16] and presented the Ukrainian portal, www.yandex.ua.[17] In 2008 Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow datacenters and UA-IX in Ukraine five times.[18] In 2007 Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users;[19] Yandex also opened its development center in Kiev in May 2007. In 2009, all services of www.yandex.ua were localized for the Ukrainian market.[20] In 2010, Yandex launched its "Poltava" search engine algorithm for Ukrainian users, based on Yandex's MatrixNet technology and ranking local resources higher for location-based queries.[21]

In March 2007 Yandex acquired moikrug.ru,[22] a Russian social network, to search and support professional and personal contacts.[23]

In June 2008 Yandex acquired SMI Link, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge it with Yandex.Maps services.[24]

In September 2008 Yandex further acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.[25]

Yandex also founded Yandex Labs in 2008. The main objective of the company, located in the San Francisco Bay area, is to foster "innovation in search and advertising technology".[26]

In August 2009 Yandex introduced a player of free legal music in its search results. A little over a year later Yandex launched the Yandex.Music service and significantly extended its music catalogue to 800,000 tracks from 58,000 performers.[27][28]

On May 19, 2010, Yandex launched an English-only web search engine.[29][30][31][32][33]

In 2010 Yandex launched the Yandex.Start program to find startups and to work with them systematically. As a result of the program, Yandex purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010.[34][35] In January 2011 the next startup, single sign-in service Loginza, was acquired by Yandex.[36]

In January 2011 Yandex introduced premium placement opportunity in its Business directory; advertisers' local small businesses will be highlighted on a map for relevant queries. It was announced that the potential audience of the product includes over 25 million users of Yandex's search engine and over 11.5 million of Yandex.Maps.[37][38]

In spring 2011 Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering on NASDAQ. It was the biggest U.S. IPO for a dotcom since Google Inc. went public in 2004.[39][40] Among the largest investors in Yandex were Baring Vostok Capital Partners and Tiger Global Management.[41]

In August 2011 Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times,[42] a news delivery startup.[43]

In September 2011 Yandex launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, at yandex.com.tr. The company also opened an office in Istanbul.[9]

In November 2011 Yandex acquired developer SPB Software.[44]

In March 2013 it was revealed that a motion movie production about the history of Yandex is in the works. http://thenextweb.com/eu/2013/03/14/what-no-justin-timberlake-a-movie-about-the-founding-of-yandex-is-in-the-works/

Yandex Search and other products rely on many technologies.

In 2009 Yandex launched MatrixNet, a new method of machine learning. It allows Yandex's search engine to take a very large number of factors into account when ranking search results. MatrixNet also allows customization of ranking formulae to a specific class of search queries. For example, music searches may be fine-tuned without undermining the quality of ranking for other types of queries.[45]

In July 2010 Yandex developed and implemented a real-time search.[46] Yandex Search learned to recognize search queries that refer to the latest events and a new searchbot named Orange was launched for real-time indexing.

Yandex continued to expand throughout 2010 with a new search technology named Spectrum. Once again the idea behind it was to understand what the user may want. If a query is ambiguous, the system will use query statistics to guess the user's intents. So, if the majority of users searching for Gone with the Wind expect to find a film, the majority of search results will be about the film, not the book.[47][48][49][50]

Yandex has also developed a method to search for and categorize duplicate images. The technology was implemented in Yandex's image search product, Yandex.Images. When it finds duplicated copies, it categorizes them into four groups: exact duplicates, thumbnail duplicates, semi-duplicates and enhanced semi-duplicates.[51]

Another Yandex service, Yandex.Traffic, calculates the average levels of city traffic congestion using data from drivers who use the mobile version of the Yandex.Maps service. The technology processes GPS tracks and merges all available information on traffic jams.[52]

Beginning in 2001, Yandex conducted regular Internet search algorithm contests under the name of the "Yandex Cup", attracting thousands of participants and awarding prizes.[53][54] Yandex kept the value of the grand prizes relatively small in order to emphasize that the purpose of the competitions was to bring together gifted, enthusiastic competitors.[55] The ninth and last competition was held in 2009.[56]

On July 6, 2006, Yandex and the BBC simultaneously hosted a webcast which used viewers' questions to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yandex and the BBC dealt with the Russian-language and the English-language questions respectively. Yandex was represented by Aleksandr Gurnov, a famous Russian journalist and celebrity.

Yandex also offers photo-sharing and professional networking features similar to Flickr and LinkedIn.

In 2007 Yandex launched Local Network Program; by renting dedicated channels, Yandex became a local resource for most of the Russian Web users.[57] By December 2008 Yandex had a local presence in every federal district in Russia.[58]

From September 16, 2008 to September 16, 2010 Yandex was one of two official ICQ distributors in Russia.[59]

Yandex subsidiary Yandex.Money is an e-commerce payment system.

In Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and subsequent versions Yandex is the default search engine for Russian-language builds rather than the previous default (Google).[60] Yandex also distributes customized releases of Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome browsers, which include the Yandex.Bar add-on and other modifications catering to the Russian-speaking audience.[61] Yandex has since released its own browser based on the Chromium open source project.[62]

Yandex provides users with strange Error 404 messages.[63] These messages can be found by altering the URL so that the site is still Yandex.com but the page does not exist. The images for the pages were designed by Roma Voroneshski and were released on February 20, 2003.[64]