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| Yadex |
Yandex is a Russian IT company which operates the largest search engine in Russia (with 64% market share, ranked eighth-largest in the world) and develops a number of Internet-based services and products. 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 is attracting more than 56 million users from all over the world. The web site is also present in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Another company, Yandex Labs, is a wholly owned division of Yandex that is located in San Francisco Bay Area.
According to research studies conducted by TNS, 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 largest advantages for Russian-language users is recognition of Russian inflection in search queries.
Yandex's roots trace back to 1990 when Arkady Volozh 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". 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 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 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 Franciso 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.
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 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.
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.
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 Firefox browser which includes Yandex.Bar add-on and other modifications catered to the Russian audience.
