Yandex

Yandex
Яндекс

File:Yandex.svg
Type	Private
Founded	1997
Headquarters	Moscow
Key people	Arkady Volozh, CEO
Industry	Internet Search Engine
Products	N/A
Revenue	▲50% US$ 300 Million (2008)
Employees	over 1600 (2009)
Website	http://www.yandex.ru/

File:Arkady Volozh RIF + C-IB 2009.JPG

Arkady Volozh is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Yandex

Yandex (Russian: Я́ндекс) is a Russian search engine, the world's second largest non-English-language web portal, and the largest Russian-language web portal. Yandex was launched in 1997. Its name can be explained as "Yet Another iNDEXer" (yandex) or "Языково́й (language) Index". The Russian word "Я" corresponds to English "I" (as the singular first-person pronoun), making "Яndex" a bilingual pun on "index".

Market Share

According to research studies conducted by TNS, FOM, and Comcon, Yandex is the largest resource and largest search engine in Russian Internet, based on the audience size and internet penetration.

The closest competitors of Yandex in the Russian market are Rambler and Mail.ru. Although services like Google and Yahoo! are also used by Russian users and have Russian-language interfaces, Google has about 22.6% of search engine generated traffic, whereas Russian sites (including Yandex) have around 56.9%. 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 the Yandex's largest advantages for Russian-language users is recognition of Russian inflection in search queries.

History

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 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.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 switched to Yandex as its default search engine for Russian-language builds rather than Google as it had been previously.

Various

Since 2001, Yandex has conducted regular Internet search contests named "Yandex Cup" with several thousands of participants and valuable prizes.

On 6 July 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. It organized its own free Wi-Fi network with hotspots all over Russia.

Yandex is one of two official ICQ distributors in Russia.

Yandex subsidiary Yandex.Money is an e-commerce payment system, the second most popular in Russia.^{[citation needed]}

Yandex distributes a customized Firefox browser which includes Yandex.Bar add-on and other modifications catered to the Russian audience.

External links

• (Russian) Yandex Portal
• www.yandex.com
• Where Google Isn't Goliath
• (English) Yandex today