Yandex

Company Overview and Market Presence - Yandex is a Russian multinational technology company that provides Internet-related products and services. - Yandex Search is its Internet search engine, launched in 1997. - The company offers information services, e-commerce, transportation, maps and navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising. - Yandex primarily serves audiences in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey, and countries with significant Russian-speaking populations. - It is the largest technology company in Russia as of 2017. - Yandex has more than 30 offices worldwide as of 2018. - 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. History and Acquisitions - Yandex was invented by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich in 1993. - The name 'Yandex' initially stood for Yet Another iNDEXer. - Yandex.ru search engine was launched in September 1997. - Yandex introduced contextual advertisement on its search engine in 1998. - In 2000, Yandex was incorporated in Cyprus as a standalone company. - Yandex acquired Russian social networking service moikrug.ru in March 2007. - In June 2008, Yandex acquired SMILink, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency. - The company acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program in September 2008. - Yandex invested in Face.com in September 2010. - In November 2011, it acquired software developer SPB Software. Finances and Offices - Yandex 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 May 2011, Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering on NASDAQ. - The weekly revenue of Yandex.Direct context ads system exceeded $1 million in June 2006. - Yandex Labs, a technology and business development unit, opened in Silicon Valley in 2008. - Istanbul office and web portal in Turkey launched in 2011. - First European office in Lucerne opened in 2012 to serve EU advertising clients. - Research and development office in Berlin started operating in 2014. - Shanghai office launched in 2015 for work with Chinese companies in the Russian language market. Products and Services - Yandex.Direct online advertising network launched in 2001. - Yandex became the default search provider for Russian-language builds of Mozilla Firefox 3.5 in 2009. - Free legal music player introduced in search results in 2009. - Yandex Music, a music streaming service, launched in 2010. - English-only web search engine launched in 2010. - Yandex Search provides search results and features such as image search and maps. - It offers a range of search services including web, image, video, news, and shopping search. - Yandex.Games is an internet gaming platform available on browsers and mobile devices. - The platform includes over 10,000 games in its catalog. - Yandex.Games generates income through advertising and in-app purchases. Technologies and Controversies - Yandex conducted tests of autonomous cars in Moscow in 2018. - The company released its first smartphone, the Yandex.Phone, in 2018. - Yandex implemented the YandexGPT generative neural network in the virtual assistant Alice in 2023. - Automatic voice-over translation for YouTube videos in multiple languages was introduced between 2021 and 2023. - Yandex launched a test of its first self-driving taxi in Moscow in 2023. - Yandex was accused of illegally collecting Ukrainian users' data and sending it to Russian security agencies. - Yandex services were banned in Ukraine in May 2017. - Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the Regin malware in October and November 2018. - Yandex's security breaches include unauthorized access to email inboxes and data harvesting from applications. - Yandex was fined by the Moscow court in June 2023 for its refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.