Yandex
Encyclopedia
Yandex is a Russia
n IT
company which operates the largest search engine in Russia
(with 64% market share) and develops a number of Internet-based services and products. Yandex is ranked as 5-th world largest search engine (more than 3 billions, 1,7% of world number, statistics of September 2011). The company's mission is to give answers to users' questions (explicit or implicit).
The Yandex.ru home page has been rated as the most popular web site in Russia. Yandex attracts more than 56 million users from all over the world. The web site is also present in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Turkey. Another company, Yandex Labs, is a wholly owned division of Yandex that is located in San Francisco Bay Area
.
, FOM, and Comcon, Yandex is the largest resource and largest search engine in the Russian Internet market, based on audience size. Yandex currently has over 64% market share in search and has over 10 billion web pages indexed.
The closest competitors of Yandex in the Russian market are Google
, Mail.ru
and Rambler
. Although services like Google
and Yahoo!
are also used by Russian users and have Russian-language interfaces, Google has about 21.9% of search engine generated traffic, Yandex has around 64.4%. Yandex is therefore one of the national non-English-language search engines (with among others Naver, Seznam.cz
and Baidu
) that outrun Google in their countries.
One of Yandex's biggest advantages for Russian-language users is recognition of Russian inflection
in search queries.
and Arkady Borkovsky have founded Arkadia company, 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.
In 1993 Arkady Volozh
and Ilya Segalovich
have invented the word "Yandex" to describe their search technologies. The name initially stood for "Yet Another iNDEXer".About Yandex — History of Yandex. Retrieved May 24, 2011. Archived copy. The Russian word "Я" ("Ya") corresponds to English personal pronoun
"I", making "Яndex" a bilingual pun
on "index"; another pun is based on 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.
Yandex's revenue comes primarily from online advertisement. In 1998 Yandex launched contextual advertisement on its search engine. In 2001 it has launched Yandex.Direct
advertisement network. 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 2 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 a representative office in Ukraine and presented the Ukrainian portal, www.yandex.ua. In 2008 Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow datacenters and UA-IX in Ukraine five times. In 2007 Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users; 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. In 2010, Yandex launched "Poltava" search engine algorythm for Ukrainian users. The engine based on Yandex's MatrixNet technology and ranked local resources higher for location-based queries.
In March 2007 Yandex acquired moikrug.ru, a Russian social network, to search and support professional and personal contacts.
In June 2008 Yandex acquired SMI Link, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge it with Yandex.Maps services.
In September 2008 Yandex acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.
In 2008 Yandex Labs was founded by Yandex. The main objective of the company located in San Francisco Bay area is to fostering "innovation in search and advertising technology".
In August 2009 Yandex introduced a player of free legal music in its search results. In September 2010 Yandex launched Yandex.Music service and significantly extended its music catalog to 800,000 tracks from 58,000 performers.
On May 19, 2010, Yandex launched an English-only web search engine.
In 2010 Yandex launched Yandex.Start program to find new startups and to work with them systematically. As a result of the program, Yandex purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010. In January 2011 the next startup, single sign-in service Loginza, was acquired by Yandex.
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.
In May 2011, Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering
on the NASDAQ
. It was the biggest U.S. IPO for a dotcom
since Google Inc. went public in 2004. Among the largest investors in Yandex were Baring Vostok Capital Partners
and Tiger Global Management.
In August 2011 Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times, a news delivery startup.
In September 2011 Yandex launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, at yandex.com.tr. The company opened also an office in Istanbul.
In November 2011 Yandex acquired developer SPB Software
.
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 into account a very large number of factors when ranking search results. MatrixNet also allows customization of ranking formula to a specific class of search queries. One may fine-tune music searches; the fine tuning will not undermine the quality of ranking for other types of queries.
In July 2010 Yandex developed and implemented real-time search. Yandex has learned to recognize search queries that refer to the latest events and launched a new searchbot named Orange for real-time indexing.
In December 2010 a new search technology named Spectrum was launched. If user's 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.
Also Yandex has developed method of search and categorization of duplicate images; the technology was implemented in Yandex's image search product, Yandex.Images. When it finds duplicate copies it categorizes them to 4 groups: exact duplicates, thumbnail duplicates, semi-duplicates and enhanced semi-duplicates.
Another Yandex service, Yandex.Traffic, calculates the average levels of city traffic congestion, using data from drivers who use mobile version of Yandex.Maps service. The technology automatically processes GPS tracks and merges all available information on traffic jams.
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 analogous 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. By December 2008 Yandex had local presence in every federal district in Russia.
From September 16, 2008 to September 16, 2010 Yandex was one of two official ICQ
distributors in Russia
.
Yandex subsidiary Yandex.Money is an e-commerce payment system, the second most popular in Russia.
In Mozilla Firefox 3.5
and subsequent versions Yandex is the default search engine for Russian-language builds rather than the previous default (Google
).
Yandex also distributes a customized releases of Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome browsers which includes Yandex.Bar add-on and other modifications catered to the Russian audience.
Articles
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n IT
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
company which operates the largest search engine in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
(with 64% market share) and develops a number of Internet-based services and products. Yandex is ranked as 5-th world largest search engine (more than 3 billions, 1,7% of world number, statistics of September 2011). The company's mission is to give answers to users' questions (explicit or implicit).
The Yandex.ru home page has been rated as the most popular web site in Russia. Yandex attracts more than 56 million users from all over the world. The web site is also present in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Turkey. Another company, Yandex Labs, is a wholly owned division of Yandex that is located in San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
.
Market share
According to research studies conducted by TNSTaylor Nelson Sofres
Taylor Nelson Sofres is a leading market research and market information group. Formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange and a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index, the firm was acquired by WPP Group in October 2008 for 1.6 billion pounds.-History:...
, FOM, and Comcon, Yandex is the largest resource and largest search engine in the Russian Internet market, based on audience size. Yandex currently has over 64% market share in search and has over 10 billion web pages indexed.
The closest competitors of Yandex in the Russian market are Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
, Mail.ru
Mail.ru
Mail.ru is the largest free e-mail service of the Runet. The business was originally owned by Port.ru, a company founded in 1998 by Eugene Goland, Michael Zaitsev and Alexey Krivenkov as spin-off from DataArt. It received an initial investment of USD 1 million from the well-known investor James...
and Rambler
Rambler (portal)
Rambler is a Russian search engine and one of the biggest Russian web portals. It is owned by the Rambler Media Group, which has belonged to Prof-Media since 2006....
. Although services like Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
and Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
are also used by Russian users and have Russian-language interfaces, Google has about 21.9% of search engine generated traffic, Yandex has around 64.4%. Yandex is therefore one of the national non-English-language search engines (with among others Naver, Seznam.cz
Seznam.cz
Seznam.cz is the most visited web portal and search engine in the Czech Republic. Founded in 1996 by Ivo Lukačovič in Prague as the fist web portal in the Czech Republic. In 2008 Seznam reached a turnover of around 1.7 billion CZK. Seznam started with a search engine and an internet version of...
and Baidu
Baidu
Baidu, Inc. , simply known as Baidu and incorporated on January 18, 2000, is a Chinese web services company headquartered in the Baidu Campus in Haidian District, Beijing, People's Republic of China....
) that outrun Google in their countries.
One of Yandex's biggest advantages for Russian-language users is recognition of Russian inflection
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
in search queries.
History
Yandex's roots trace back to 1990 when Arkady VolozhArkady Volozh
Arkady Yurievich Volozh is the principal founder of Russian search engine Yandex. He has been the company’s CEO and a director since 2000...
and Arkady Borkovsky have founded Arkadia company, 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.
In 1993 Arkady Volozh
Arkady Volozh
Arkady Yurievich Volozh is the principal founder of Russian search engine Yandex. He has been the company’s CEO and a director since 2000...
and Ilya Segalovich
Ilya Segalovich
Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich – is a co-founder of Russian search engine Yandex. He has been CTO and director of Yandex since 2000...
have invented the word "Yandex" to describe their search technologies. The name initially stood for "Yet Another iNDEXer".About Yandex — History of Yandex. Retrieved May 24, 2011. Archived copy. The Russian word "Я" ("Ya") corresponds to English personal pronoun
Personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...
"I", making "Яndex" a bilingual pun
Bilingual pun
A bilingual pun is a pun in which a word in one language is similar to a word in another language; this is often done by mixing languages, and is a form of macaronic language...
on "index"; another pun is based on yin and yang
Yin and yang
In Asian philosophy, the concept of yin yang , which is often referred to in the West as "yin and yang", is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Opposites thus only...
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.
Yandex's revenue comes primarily from online advertisement. In 1998 Yandex launched contextual advertisement on its search engine. In 2001 it has launched Yandex.Direct
Yandex.Direct
Yandex.Direct is an automated, auction-based system for placement of text-based advertising in Russia. Yandex.Direct was launched in 2001. Its rivals, Begun and Google AdWords, began their operations in Russia in 2002....
advertisement network. 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 2 years earlier. The net income of the company in 2004 constituted $7M. In June 2006, the weekly revenue of Yandex.Direct
Yandex.Direct
Yandex.Direct is an automated, auction-based system for placement of text-based advertising in Russia. Yandex.Direct was launched in 2001. Its rivals, Begun and Google AdWords, began their operations in Russia in 2002....
context ads system exceeded $1M. All of Yandex's accounting measures have been audited by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited , commonly referred to as Deloitte, is one of the Big Four accountancy firms along with PricewaterhouseCoopers , Ernst & Young, and KPMG....
since 1999.
In September 2005 Yandex opened a representative office in Ukraine and presented the Ukrainian portal, www.yandex.ua. In 2008 Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow datacenters and UA-IX in Ukraine five times. In 2007 Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users; 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. In 2010, Yandex launched "Poltava" search engine algorythm for Ukrainian users. The engine based on Yandex's MatrixNet technology and ranked local resources higher for location-based queries.
In March 2007 Yandex acquired moikrug.ru, a Russian social network, to search and support professional and personal contacts.
In June 2008 Yandex acquired SMI Link, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge it with Yandex.Maps services.
In September 2008 Yandex acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.
In 2008 Yandex Labs was founded by Yandex. The main objective of the company located in San Francisco Bay area is to fostering "innovation in search and advertising technology".
In August 2009 Yandex introduced a player of free legal music in its search results. In September 2010 Yandex launched Yandex.Music service and significantly extended its music catalog to 800,000 tracks from 58,000 performers.
On May 19, 2010, Yandex launched an English-only web search engine.
In 2010 Yandex launched Yandex.Start program to find new startups and to work with them systematically. As a result of the program, Yandex purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010. In January 2011 the next startup, single sign-in service Loginza, was acquired by Yandex.
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.
In May 2011, Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...
on the NASDAQ
NASDAQ
The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...
. It was the biggest U.S. IPO for a dotcom
Dot-com company
A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com , is a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website that uses the popular top-level domain, ".com" .While the term can refer to present-day companies, it is also used specifically to refer to companies with...
since Google Inc. went public in 2004. Among the largest investors in Yandex were Baring Vostok Capital Partners
Baring Vostok Capital Partners
Baring Vostok Capital Partners is an independent private equity firm focused on investments in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States...
and Tiger Global Management.
In August 2011 Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times, a news delivery startup.
In September 2011 Yandex launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, at yandex.com.tr. The company opened also an office in Istanbul.
In November 2011 Yandex acquired developer SPB Software
SPB Software
SPB Software Inc. is a division of Yandex, the leading Russian IT company which operates the largest search engine in Russia. A global company developing mobile solutions for OEM mobile device manufacturers, mobile carriers, smartphone, tablet, and end users, SPB develops software running on...
.
Technologies
Yandex SearchYandex Search
Yandex Search is a web search engine owned by Russian corporation Yandex. It is the core product of Yandex. In 2010, Yandex Search generated 64% of all search traffic in Russia.The search technology provides local search results in more than 1,400 cities...
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 into account a very large number of factors when ranking search results. MatrixNet also allows customization of ranking formula to a specific class of search queries. One may fine-tune music searches; the fine tuning will not undermine the quality of ranking for other types of queries.
In July 2010 Yandex developed and implemented real-time search. Yandex has learned to recognize search queries that refer to the latest events and launched a new searchbot named Orange for real-time indexing.
In December 2010 a new search technology named Spectrum was launched. If user's 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
Gone with the Wind (film)
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...
expect to find a film, the majority of search results will be about the film, not the book.
Also Yandex has developed method of search and categorization of duplicate images; the technology was implemented in Yandex's image search product, Yandex.Images. When it finds duplicate copies it categorizes them to 4 groups: exact duplicates, thumbnail duplicates, semi-duplicates and enhanced semi-duplicates.
Another Yandex service, Yandex.Traffic, calculates the average levels of city traffic congestion, using data from drivers who use mobile version of Yandex.Maps service. The technology automatically processes GPS tracks and merges all available information on traffic jams.
Various
From 2001 to 2009 Yandex was conducting regular Internet search contests under the name of the "Yandex Cup" with several thousands of participants and valuable prizes. However, in 2011 they decided to not take them as seriously as others ("First, we didn't announce it and we are not going to give away big prizes for the champions, although we will give the winners some presents.")On July 6, 2006, Yandex and the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
simultaneously hosted a webcast which used viewers' questions to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin served as the second President of the Russian Federation and is the current Prime Minister of Russia, as well as chairman of United Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus. He became acting President on 31 December 1999, when...
. Yandex and the BBC dealt with the Russian-language and the English-language questions respectively. Yandex was represented by Aleksandr Gurnov
Aleksandr Gurnov
Aleksandr Gurnov is a Russian TV persona.In 1973, Aleksandr Gurnov became a correspondent for the Russian national newspapers Pionerskaya Pravda and Komsomolskaya Pravda...
, a famous Russian journalist and celebrity.
Yandex also offers photo-sharing and professional networking features analogous to Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
and LinkedIn
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,...
.
In 2007 Yandex launched Local Network Program; by renting dedicated channels Yandex became a local resource for most of the Russian Web users. By December 2008 Yandex had local presence in every federal district in Russia.
From September 16, 2008 to September 16, 2010 Yandex was one of two official ICQ
ICQ
ICQ is an instant messaging computer program, which was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company Mirabilis, then bought by America Online, and since April 2010 owned by Mail.ru Group. The name ICQ is a homophone for the phrase "I seek you"...
distributors in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
.
Yandex subsidiary Yandex.Money is an e-commerce payment system, the second most popular in Russia.
In Mozilla Firefox 3.5
Mozilla Firefox 3.5
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is a version of the Firefox web browser released in June 2009, adding a variety of new features to Firefox. Version 3.5 was touted as being twice as fast as 3.0...
and subsequent versions Yandex is the default search engine for Russian-language builds rather than the previous default (Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
).
Yandex also distributes a customized releases of Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome browsers which includes Yandex.Bar add-on and other modifications catered to the Russian audience.
External links
- Yandex Portal, www.yandex.ru or Яндекс.рф
- Yandex English-only search engine
- Yandex today
Articles