Yandex LLC (Russian: Яндекс, tr.Yandeks, IPA:[ˈjandəks]) is a Russian multinational technology company[5] providing Internet-related products and services, including an Internet search engine called Yandex Search, launched in 1997, information services, e-commerce, transportation, maps and navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising.[6][2] Yandex Holding Company was incorporated in 2000. As of 2016, it primarily served audiences in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey and countries with a significant Russian-speaking population.[7]
As of 2017, the firm was the largest technology company in Russia.[8] It had more than 30 offices worldwide in 2018.[9] Its main competitors in the Russian market are Google, Microsoft, VK, and Rambler. Yandex Search has the largest market share of any search engine from Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, and is the third largest search engine worldwide after Google and Bing.[10]
In February 2024, Yandex N.V. announced the sale of the majority of its Russia-based assets to a consortium of Russia-based investors.[14][15]
History
In 1993, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, friends since their school days and by then working together to develop search software,[16] invented the word "Yandex" to describe their search technologies. The name initially stood for "Yet Another iNDEXer".[17] However, this is also a bilingual pun on "index" since "Я" ("ya") means "I" in Russian. Another pun is based on the yin and yang contrast (Russian: инь – индекс, ян – яндекс).[citation needed]
On September 23, 1997, the Yandex.ru search engine was launched and presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow.[18] Initially, the search engine was developed by Comptek.[17]
In 1998, Yandex launched contextual advertisement on its search engine.[citation needed]
In 2000, Yandex was incorporated in Cyprus as a standalone company by Arkady Volozh.[17]
In September 2005, it opened an office in Ukraine[19] and launched www.yandex.ua.[20] In 2007, Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users;[21] Yandex also opened its development center in Kyiv in May 2007. In 2008, Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow data centers and UA-IX in Ukraine fivefold.[22] In 2009, all services of www.yandex.ua were localized for the Ukrainian market.[23] In 2010, Yandex launched its "Poltava" search engine algorithm for Ukrainian users, based on its MatrixNet technology.[24]
On June 20, 2008, it announced the formation of Yandex Labs in Silicon Valley, to foster "innovation in search and advertising technology".[25]
In 2020 Yandex published its internal operating principles.[26]
There are more than 35 principles. These include: "We do not develop technology for military purposes", "We comply with the laws of each country that we operate in and try to constructively contribute to any proposed legislation that concerns technology or the market", and "The products and services that we make don't have any persuasion or political overtones."[27] For example, Yandex advertising services do not accept political ads.[28]
In March 2022, executive director and deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan resigned after EU sanctions.[29]
In December 2022 it became known that "Yandex" registered the company Beyond ML in Armenia.[35] On December 30, Arkady Volozh announced his departure from Yandex by publishing a letter to employees on the company's internal portal.[36]
On May 17, 2023, Yandex launched its YaGPT neural network (analogous to the ChatGPT neural network).
Acquisitions
In March 2007, it acquired Russian social networking service moikrug.ru.;[37] on June 16, 2008, Yandex acquired SMILink, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge with Yandex.Maps services.[38] In September 2008, the company acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.[39]
In September 2010, it invested in a $4.3 million financing round by Face.com.[40] The company was acquired by Facebook in 2012. In December 2010, the firm launched Yandex.Start to find startups and work with them systematically, and purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010.[41][42] In September 2011, it invested in Blekko as part of a $30 million financing round.[43][44] In November 2011, it acquired software developer SPB Software for $38 million.[45][46] In June 2012, it acquired a 25% stake in Seismotech, for $1 million.[47][48] On January 26, 2011, it introduced premium placement opportunity in its Business directory in which advertisers' local small businesses are highlighted.[49] On January 27, 2011, the company acquired single sign-in service Loginza.[50]
In August 2011, Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times, a news delivery startup.[51] In September 2011, it launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, opening an office in Istanbul.[52]
In May 2018, Sberbank and Yandex completed a joint venture deal to develop a B2C eCommerce ecosystem.[67] In October 2018, Yandex acquired Edadil (Russian: Едадил, lit. "grocery deals"), a deal aggregator service.[68]
In June 2021, Yandex, VTB Bank, LANIT Group and computer hardware producer Gigabyte founded a joint venture to start producing servers in Russia in 2022.[69] In October 2021, construction of a new plant in Ryazan Oblast was launched with 1 billion roubles during the first stage of investments. The new plant will produce servers, data storage systems, gateways and smart equipment under "Openyard" brand.[70] However, in June 2023 Yandex announced it was looking for ways to exit the joint venture.[71]
In January 2022, Yandex acquired "eLama", digital advertising platform, waiting for the approval from Federal Antimonopoly Service.[72] That same month Yandex has also bought "BandLink" music service.[73]
Finances
The company became profitable in November 2002. In 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17 million, up 1000% in 2 years. The net income of the company in 2004 was $7 million. In June 2006, the weekly revenue of Yandex.Direct context ads system exceeded $1 million. The company's accounting has been audited by Deloitte since 1999.
In 2013, Yandex became the largest media property in Russia by revenue.[76]
In March 2022, Yandex warned shareholders about the risk of a default if holders of Yandex N.V. wished to use their right to pay them off early. Before that, the trading of Yandex securities on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ was suspended due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.[77]
In September 2022, Yandex bought back 98.7% of issued Yandex N.V convertible bonds.[78]
In April 2022, TechCrunch reported that Yandex signed an agreement with VK holding with regard to the sale of News and Zen media services together with the main page yandex.ru[79]
In September 2022, News, Zen, and yandex.ru were transferred to a new owner.[80]
At the same time ya.ru became Yandex's new main page as well as the key entry point for Search, Mail and other non-media services.[81]
In November 2022, the board of directors of Yandex N.V. announced a possible restructuring of the company.
The main part of the business will be placed into a separate group of companies that will keep the Yandex brand, which may be registered in Russia.
The international parts of some businesses will be placed into separate companies under the control of Dutch Yandex N.V. which will itself eventually leave the shareholders of Russian Yandex Group.[82]
In March 2023, the NASDAQ exchange announced its intention to delist Yandex and a number of other companies doing business in Russia. Yandex appealed this decision. NASDAQ granted the appeal, given the company's plans to separate Russian and foreign businesses. The suspension of trading remains in effect.[83]
In May 2023, Yandex announced that it received applications from potential investors for the purchase of an economic share in the company.
Economic investors will not be able to influence the company's activities. And voting control and management will remain with the top management of Yandex.
Among the main applicants were private industrial investors Vagit Alekperov (Lukoil Founder) and Vladimir Potanin.[84]
Offices
In 2008, Yandex opened a technology and business development unit called Yandex Labs in Silicon Valley.[25] In 2011, the Istanbul office was launched together with the company's web portal in Turkey in 2011.[52]
In 2012, the company opened its first European office in Lucerne to serve advertising clients in the EU.[85] Its first research and development office in Europe started operating in Berlin in 2014.[86] In 2015, the company's Shanghai office was launched to facilitate work with Chinese companies operating on the Russian language market.[87]
As of 2018 it had more than 30 offices worldwide.[9]
In December 2021 a new location in Prague was added to accommodate the company's rapidly expanding crowdsourcing, routing, cloud computing, ridesharing and weather forecasting teams.[88]
As of 2021, Yandex had offices in 12 countries.[89]
On 28 April 2022, Yandex announced that it had sold its news and blogging products to VK.[100]
In 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism said that Yandex-delivered ads promoted misinformation about the war in Ukraine which were produced by more than half a dozen Russian-language news sites.[101] Many of the articles displayed in Yandex's news aggregators were also from Russian state-owned and state-sponsored sources while the top search results about the war would sometimes prominently feature pro-war websites.[102]
Yandex.Games is an Internet gaming platform made by Yandex, which is available on both browser and mobile.[citation needed] As of 2022, the number of games included in the catalog exceeded 10,000,[103] with more than 11 million players a month.[104] The platform provides two types of income: advertising and in-app purchases. There is also an in-game currency called "Yans".[104]
Developers add their games to the catalog independently and edit them in the future. All games are moderated. Mandatory requirements include integration with the Yandex.Games SDK, support for HTTPS and offline Service Worker mode.[105] Game developers follow the updates of the platform in the blog, and content is provided by companies all over the world (e.g. Dutch media platform Azerion[106]).
In addition to a wide system of user ratings and reviews, the service uses complex algorithms to create personalized collections: games that have already been played, or those that are likely to be played.[107]
Technologies
On 16 February 2018, the company showed off the first tests of its autonomous cars in Moscow.[108][109]
On 5 December 2018, Yandex announced the release of their first smartphone, the Yandex.Phone.[110]
In May 2023, Yandex implemented the YandexGPT generative neural network in the virtual assistant Alice.[111]
Between 2021 and 2023, Yandex introduced automatic voice-over translation for any YouTube video in English, Chinese, French, Spanish and German.[112]
On 7 June 2023, the company launched a test of its first self-driving taxi in Moscow.[113]
Facial recognition on cameras
Toloka AI bv is a subsidiary of Yandex. The company focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Training facial recognition software requires a lot of human work. To teach a computer what is on a photo, thousands of images must be manually categorized. Through Toloka's online platform, users worldwide can, in exchange for a small fee, carry out assignments that generate data for training facial recognition software.
Two companies within the Moscow surveillance system, Tevian and NTechLab, did business with the Toloka company. The facial recognition software from Tevian and NtechLab had been used in Moscow since at least 2017.
Yandex Russia created a separate platform for analysis tasks for Russian users and customers, called Yandex Tasks. The company started migrating Russian customers from Toloka to Yandex Tasks in December 2023 and works with NTechLab.[114]
The Kremlin planned in 2024 to use NTechLab's software for a secret center that will collect and analyze CCTV footage from across Russia. The aim of the project is to 'identify threats in a timely manner' and 'monitor individuals for destructive and/or disloyal behavior'.[115]
Open source
In 2009, Yandex began development on its project MatrixNet. It was a unique patented algorithm for the building of machine learning models, which used one of the original gradient boosting schemes. In July 2017, the CatBoost library was released to the public. It implements the Matrixnet algorithm for the building of machine learning models.[116]
At the time of release, the technology was already in use as part of a collaborative project with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to analyze the results of conducted particle experiments [117] CatBoost is used by foreign companies. For example: JetBrains uses it for code completion, CloudFlare for bot detection, and Careem for trip-distance determination.[118][119][120]
In 2012, Yandex began research and development within the field of natural-speech processing. And in October 2023, the company introduced Yandex SpeechKit. It is a speech-recognition and synthesis technology as well as a public API for speech recognition that Android and iOS developers can use.[121]
In 2022, the company published the source code for the YDB database management system. It is used in its own voice assistant Alice as well as in Yandex.Go and Yandex Market services.[122]
In 2023, Yandex published the source code for YTsaurus. It is a platform for work with big data.[123]
Investments
Yandex is an investor in several foreign companies. Examples include: Vizi Labs, Face.com, Blekko, and SalesPredict.[124]
Security
On June 1, 2017, Yandex closed its offices in Kyiv and Odesa, Ukraine after the Security Service of Ukraine raided the offices and accused the company of illegally collecting Ukrainian users' data and sending it to Russian security agencies.[125] The firm denied any wrongdoing. In May 2017, all Yandex services were banned in Ukraine by Presidential Decree No. 133/2017.[126]
In October and November 2018, Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the Regin malware, aimed at stealing technical information from its research and development unit on how users were authenticated.[127] An investigation by Kaspersky Lab attributed the hacks to Five Eyes intelligence agencies.[127]
In February 2021 Yandex admitted that one of their system administrators with access rights to Yandex's email service had enabled unauthorized access, leading to almost 5,000 Yandex email inboxes being compromised.[131]
On January 25, 2023, a leaked archive with approx. 44 GB of Yandex services was shared on BreachForums via BitTorrent.[132][133]
In June 2023 Yandex was fined by the Moscow court for its repeated refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.[134]
News and media
In April 2014, a film about the history of Yandex called Startup was released.[135]
On 20 April 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, Yandex made its home coronavirus testing service free of charge for all residents of Moscow and its surroundings, extending it to other regions in the future. Previously, it announced the launch of the service on 16 April.[136]
In late March 2022, Yandex was the subject of a Financial Times investigation that had been initiated by the nonprofit organization Me2B Alliance as part of an application auditing campaign led by researcher Zach Edwards. Edwards and four expert researchers, including Cher Scarlett, a former Apple security engineer, found that a software development kit (SDK) called AppMetrica, a product of Yandex, was harvesting data from more than 52,000 applications such as a user's device fingerprint and IP address and storing it in Russia on Yandex's servers, which they said due to Russian law, and the nature of SDKs, could be accessed by Russian authorities without their knowledge and used to identify them. Yandex said of identification by the data collected: "Although theoretically possible, in practice it is extremely hard to identify users based solely on such information collected." Of authority requests for data they said: "Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down."[137][138]
According to Meduza investigation published on 5 May 2022, since 2016 the top-5 news on the Yandex's main page are formed on the basis of a secret list of Russian media approved by Presidential Administration of Russia, which includes only pro-Kremlin media. Yandex stated that the highest-ranked news on its main page is generated automatically through its algorithm. Because of laws around news aggregators, only news received from registered media sources may appear on it.[139]
In March 2022, Yandex began to look for ways to offload its news aggregator and blogging-recommendation platform as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine as well as the Kremlin's increased control of the media and freedom of expression.[140] Yandex sought to focus on something that "under no circumstances can be politicized in any way. Under the current conditions, it is impossible to continue developing content and information services that affect a large number of people."[141]
In September 2022, Yandex sold its media assets. The company transferred News, Zen, and also the main page yandex.ru to VK Holding.[140]
^ ab"Yandex Launches in Turkey" (Press release). Yandex. September 20, 2011. Archived from the original on January 10, 2021. Retrieved February 18, 2018.
