Yandex

Yandex
Яндекс
Type Public company
Traded as NASDAQ: YNDX, MCX: YNDX
Founded 1997: Yandex search launched by CompTek
2000: Yandex company founded
Headquarters Lev Tolstoy st. 16, Moscow, 119021, Russia
Area served Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey
Founder(s) Arkady Volozh
Arkady Borkovsky
Ilya Segalovich
Key people Arkady Volozh, CEO
Industry Internet
Products Yandex Search
Yandex Direct
Yandex Mail
Yandex Fotki
Yandex Browser
Yandex Maps
Yandex News
Yandex Music
Yandex Video
Yandex Money
Yandex Catalog
Yandex Taxi
Ya.ru
Moikrug
Revenue Increase 39.5 billion rub. (2013)[1]
Operating income Increase 12.8 billion rub. (2013)[1]
Net income Increase 13.5 billion rub. (2013)[1]
Total assets Increase 34.07 billion rub. (2011)[2]
Total equity Increase 28.95 billion rub. (2011)[2]
Employees 5,514(September 2014)[3]
Slogan(s) Yandex. Everything will be found.
Website www.yandex.ru
www.yandex.ua (Ukrainian version)
www.yandex.com (English version)
www.yandex.com.tr (Turkish version)
www.yandex.kz (Kazakh version)
www.yandex.by (Belarusian version)
Alexa rank Decrease 29 (March 2015)[4]

Yandex (Russian: Яндекс) is a Russian Internet company which operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 60% market share in that country.[5] 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.[6] The company's mission is to provide answers to any questions users have or think about (explicit or implicit).[7] Yandex also has a very large presence in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, providing nearly a third of all search results in those markets and 43% of all search results in Belarus.[8]

The Yandex.ru home page has been rated the most popular website in Russia.[9] The web site also operates in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Turkey.[10] Yandex Labs is a wholly owned division of Yandex located in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, Yandex announced plans to open a research and development office in Berlin, Germany.[11]

Market share

According to research studies conducted by TNS, FOM, and Comcon, Yandex[12] 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 55%[5] in Russia's search engine market by traffic.[13]

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 Russian inflection in search queries.[14]

History

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.[15]

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] 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.[17]

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.[17] 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 Ukraine[18] and presented the Ukrainian portal, www.yandex.ua.[19] In 2008 Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow datacenters and UA-IX in Ukraine five times.[20] In 2007 Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users;[21] 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.[22] 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.[23]

In March 2007 Yandex acquired moikrug.ru,[24] a Russian social network, to search and support professional and personal contacts.[25] In June 2008 Yandex acquired SMI Link, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge it with Yandex.Maps services.[26]

In September 2008 Yandex further acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.[27]

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".[28]

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.[29][30]

In Mozilla Firefox 3.5, and subsequent versions, Yandex is the default search provider for Russian-language builds rather than the previous default (Google).[31]

On May 19, 2010, Yandex launched an English-only web search engine.[32][33][34][35][36]

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.[37][38] In January 2011 the next startup, single sign-in service Loginza, was acquired by Yandex.[39]

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.[40][41]

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.[42][43] Among the largest investors in Yandex were Baring Vostok Capital Partners and Tiger Global Management.[44]

In August 2011 Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times,[45] a news delivery startup.[46]

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.[10]

In November 2011 Yandex acquired developer SPB Software.[47]

In June 2012 Yandex acquired share in Seismotech, Ltd. that provides services in the area of interpretative processing of seismic data and software development (Prime package), and provided its equipment and distributed computing technologies for processing of geological-geophysical data.

In March 2013 it was revealed that a motion movie production about the history of Yandex is in the works.[48] In July 2013, Mail.Ru started placing Yandex.Direct ads on its search result pages.[49] October 2013 Yandex acquired KinoPoisk, the biggest Russian movie search engine.[50] Also in 2013, Yandex became the largest media property in Russia by generated revenue.[51]

In March 2014 Yandex acquired Israeli geolocation startup KitLocate.[52]

In June 2014 Yandex acquired the online auto classifieds portal Auto.ru[53]

Services

Clock at the Saint Petersburg office

Software

Mobile apps

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 http://company.yandex.ru/press_releases/2014/0220/index.xml
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "2010 Form 10-K, Yandex". Google.
  3. ↑ "INVESTOR RELATIONS FAQ". Yandex. Retrieved June 2014.
  4. ↑ "Yandex.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2015-03-27.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "статистика сайта "Сайты Рунета"". Liveinternet.ru. Retrieved May 23, 2012.
  6. ↑ Clayton, Nick (11 February 2013). "Yandex Overtakes Bing as World's Fourth Search Engine". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2013-02-21.
  7. ↑ "Yandex Today". Company.yandex.com. Retrieved May 23, 2012.
  8. ↑ Khan, Sardar Mohkim (4 May 2011). "Russian Search Engine Yandex Shared Information With FSB". articstartup.com. Retrieved 2013-03-16.
  9. ↑ "Top Sites in Russia". Alexa. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Yandex.Company — Yandex Launches in Turkey". Company.yandex.com. Retrieved 2012-09-10.
  11. ↑ "Russia's Yandex to open new office in Europe". Reuters. 6 February 2014. Retrieved 15 October 2014.
  12. ↑ Yandex Rallies on Q4 Results, Forbes.com, February 22, 2012.
  13. ↑ "Liveinternet stats provider, Russian sites visited by Russians".
  14. ↑ Ioffe, Julia (2009-02-09). "Google's Russian threat". CNN.
  15. ↑ "История Яндекса". Company.yandex.ru. Retrieved 2012-09-10.
  16. ↑ "Emerging Leader: Arkady Volozh | Thomas White International". Thomaswhite.com. May 29, 2012. Retrieved 2012-05-29.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 About Yandex — History of Yandex. Retrieved May 24, 2011. Archived copy.
  18. ↑ "Yandex Representative Office Now in Ukraine". Company.yandex.com. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  19. ↑ "Yandex Presents www.yandex.ua". Company.yandex.com. September 20, 2005. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  20. ↑ "Yandex Extends its Presence in Ukraine". Company.yandex.com. August 20, 20. Retrieved May 5, 2011. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  21. ↑ http://company.yandex.com/press_center/press_releases/2007/2007-10-02.xml
  22. ↑ "Yandex Learns Languages". Company.yandex.com. 2009-11-19. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  23. ↑ "Yandex Search for Ukraine’s Every Region". Company.yandex.com. 2010-07-27. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  24. ↑ "moikrug.ru". moikrug.ru. Retrieved 2012-10-09.
  25. ↑
  26. ↑ "Yandex buys Russian road traffic monitoring agency Smilink".
  27. ↑ "Yandex Releases Punto 3.0". Company.yandex.com. September 9, 2008. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  28. ↑ "Yandex Labs". Company.yandex.com. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  29. ↑ "Enhanced Music Streaming on Yandex". Company.yandex.com. September 22, 2010. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  30. ↑ "Вы только послушайте! - Блог Яндекса - я.ру". Clubs.ya.ru. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  31. ↑ Shankland, Stephen (January 9, 2009). "Firefox in Russia dumps Google for Yandex". CNET News. Retrieved 2009-01-10.
  32. ↑ "Yandex Adds Foreign Content to Its Search Index". Company.yandex.com. May 19, 2010. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  33. ↑ Александр Амзин (2010-05-19). "Медиа: Яндекс.Забугорье". Lenta.ru. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  34. ↑ "Yandex opts for latin script to broaden market reach – RT". Rt.com. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  35. ↑ "Russian search engine looks to challenge Google - paper, Russia, RIA Novosti". En.rian.ru. May 19, 2010. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  36. ↑ "Yandex Launches Foreign-Language Search Engine, Business". The Moscow Times. May 20, 2010. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  37. ↑ "Yandex Supports Startups". Company.yandex.com. 2010-12-24. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  38. ↑ Mike Butcher Dec 24, 2010 (December 24, 2010). "Yandex Acquires WebVisor’s Behavior Analysis Technology, Team". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  39. ↑ O'Hear, Steve (January 27, 2011). "Yandex Acquires Single Sign-In Service Loginza". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  40. ↑ Yandex Geo-targeted Ads in Maps, Search Results Open for Business, Search Engine Watch, 28.01.2011
  41. ↑ "Yandex Offers Geo-targeted Ads to Businesses". Company.yandex.com. January 26, 2011. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  42. ↑
  43. ↑ Rusli, Evelyn M. (May 24, 2011). "Yandex Shares Soar 55% in Market Debut". The New York Times.
  44. ↑ Baring Vostok-backed Yandex files for IPO. AltAssets, May 3, 2011
  45. ↑ "tweetedtimes.com". tweetedtimes.com. Retrieved 2012-10-09.
  46. ↑ Andrews, robert (August 26, 2011). "Yandex buying twitter 'newspaper' maker the tweeted times". Retrieved October 11, 2011.
  47. ↑ "Yandex Acquires SPB Software Developer to Expand Mobile Products". November 28, 2011. Retrieved November 28, 2011.
  48. ↑ Wauters, Robin. (2013-03-14) They're Making A Movie About Yandex (Sans Justin Timberlake). Thenextweb.com. Retrieved on 2013-09-09.
  49. ↑ "Mail.ru, Yandex agree to place ads from Yandex.Direct on search engine". Interfax. July 25, 2013. Retrieved May 27, 2014.
  50. ↑ Lunden, Ingrid (October 15, 2013). "Yandex Buys KinoPoisk, ‘Russia’s IMDb’". techcrunch. Retrieved October 26, 2013.
  51. ↑ d’Amora, Delphine (April 10, 2014). "Internet Titan Yandex Leads State-Owned Channel One for 2013 Revenue". The Moscow Times. Retrieved May 27, 2014.
  52. ↑ "Russian Search Giant Yandex Acquires Low-Power Mobile Geolocation Startup KitLocate". techcrunch. March 19, 2014. Retrieved March 19, 2014. |first1= missing |last1= in Authors list (help)
  53. ↑ "Yandex to Acquire Auto.ru". WSJ. June 16, 2014. Retrieved June 16, 2014.
  54. ↑ Size of your inbox

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