Yandex facts for kids
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Headquarters in Moscow
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Native name
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Яндекс
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| Headquarters | Moscow, Russia |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
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Key people
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| Products | List of Yandex products and services |
| Revenue | $4.84 billion (2021) |
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Operating income
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$189 million (2022) |
| -$199 million (2021) | |
| Total assets | $8.82 billion (31 December 2022) |
| Total equity | $4.53 billion (31 December 2022) |
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Number of employees
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10,227 (2020) |
| Parent | Yandex N.V., Schiphol Boulevard 165, Schiphol Airport, Netherlands |
Yandex LLC (Russian: Яндекс, tr. Yandeks) is a big technology company from Russia. It offers many online products and services. These include its own Internet search engine called Yandex Search, which started in 1997. Yandex also provides online shopping, maps, navigation, mobile apps, and online ads.
Yandex mainly serves users in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey, and other countries where many people speak Russian. As of 2017, it was the largest tech company in Russia. In 2018, it had over 30 offices around the world. Yandex Search is the most popular search engine in Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. It is also the third largest search engine globally, after Google and Bing.
Contents
How Yandex Started
In 1993, two friends, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, came up with the name "Yandex." They were working on search software together. The name first meant "Yet Another iNDEXer." It's also a clever play on words, as "Я" ("ya") means "I" in Russian.
On September 23, 1997, the Yandex.ru search engine officially launched. It was shown at a big exhibition in Moscow. At first, the company Comptek developed the search engine. In 1998, Yandex started showing ads on its search engine. In 2000, Yandex became its own company.
Growing Across Countries
Yandex expanded to other countries over the years. In 2005, it opened an office in Ukraine. It launched a special search engine for Ukrainian users in 2007. Yandex also opened a development center in Kyiv. By 2009, all its services in Ukraine were made local for Ukrainian users.
In 2008, Yandex opened Yandex Labs in Silicon Valley, USA. This was to help create new search and advertising technologies.
In February 2024, Yandex N.V. announced it would sell most of its businesses in Russia to a group of Russian investors.
Yandex's Rules and Changes
In 2020, Yandex shared its internal rules for how it operates. There are more than 35 rules. Some of these rules state:
- "We do not create technology for military uses."
- "We follow the laws of every country we work in."
- "Our products and services do not try to persuade or have political messages."
For example, Yandex's advertising services do not accept political ads.
Some leaders at Yandex left the company in 2022. This included executive director Tigran Khudaverdyan in March, CEO Elena Bunina in April, and founder Arkady Volozh in June.
In August 2022, Yandex announced it was buying Delivery Club from another company called VK. In return, VK would get Yandex.Zen and Yandex.News.
In December 2022, Arkady Volozh officially announced he was leaving Yandex. In May 2023, Yandex launched its own AI tool called YaGPT, which is similar to ChatGPT.
What Yandex Has Bought
Yandex has bought many smaller companies to grow its services:
- In 2007, it bought moikrug.ru, a Russian social network.
- In 2008, it bought SMILink, a company that monitors road traffic. This helped improve Yandex.Maps.
- It also bought Punto Switcher, a program that automatically switches keyboard layouts between Russian and English.
- In 2010, Yandex invested in Face.com, a face recognition company.
- It also bought WebVisor's technology, which helps understand how users behave online.
- In 2011, Yandex bought SPB Software, a software developer.
- It also acquired Loginza, a service for signing in to different websites.
- In 2011, Yandex bought The Tweeted Times, a news startup.
- In 2013, it acquired KinoPoisk, the biggest Russian movie search engine.
- In 2014, Yandex bought KitLocate, an Israeli company that helps find locations. It also opened a research office in Israel.
- In June 2014, it bought Auto.ru, a website for buying and selling cars, for $175 million.
- In 2015, it acquired Agnitum, an internet security company.
- In 2017, Yandex invested in Doc+, a medical service.
- In December 2017, it bought Foodfox, a food delivery company.
- In 2018, Uber and Yandex merged their taxi businesses in several countries, including Russia. Yandex owned most of this new company.
- In 2018, Yandex also bought Edadil, a service that finds grocery deals.
- In 2022, Yandex bought "eLama," a digital advertising platform, and "BandLink," a music service.
Yandex Offices Around the World
Yandex has offices in many different places:
- In 2008, it opened Yandex Labs in Silicon Valley, USA.
- In 2011, an office opened in Istanbul, Turkey, along with a Yandex website for Turkey.
- In 2012, the company opened its first European office in Lucerne, Switzerland, to help advertising clients in Europe.
- Its first research office in Europe started in Berlin, Germany, in 2014.
- In 2015, the Shanghai, China, office opened to work with Chinese companies in the Russian-speaking market.
- By 2018, Yandex had over 30 offices worldwide.
- In December 2021, a new office was added in Prague to support teams working on things like mapping, cloud computing, and weather.
- As of 2021, Yandex had offices in 12 countries.
Yandex Products and Services
Yandex offers many useful online tools:
- In 2001, it launched Yandex.Direct, an online advertising network.
- In 2009, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 started using Yandex as the main search engine for Russian-language versions.
- In 2009, Yandex added a player for free legal music in its search results.
- In September 2010, Yandex launched Yandex Music, a service for streaming music. It had 800,000 songs at the start.
- On May 19, 2010, it launched a search engine just for English speakers.
- In March 2013, the company added an English option to its translation app.
- On October 10, 2017, Yandex introduced its smart helper, Alisa (Alice). You can use her on Android, iOS, and Windows devices.
- On April 28, 2022, Yandex announced it had sold its news and blogging products to VK.
Yandex Games
Yandex.Games is an online gaming platform from Yandex. You can play games on a web browser or on mobile devices. In 2022, there were over 10,000 games, with more than 11 million players each month. Game developers can earn money from ads and in-app purchases. There's also a special in-game money called "Yans."
Developers add their games to the platform themselves. All games are checked to make sure they are good. The platform also uses smart computer programs to suggest games you might like.
Yandex Technologies
Yandex works on many advanced technologies:
- On February 16, 2018, the company showed its first tests of autonomous cars (self-driving cars) in Moscow.
- On December 5, 2018, Yandex released its first smartphone, the Yandex.Phone.
- In May 2023, Yandex added its YaGPT AI to its virtual assistant, Alice.
- Between 2021 and 2023, Yandex created a way to automatically translate the voice in any YouTube video from English, Chinese, French, Spanish, and German.
- On June 7, 2023, the company started testing its first self-driving taxi in Moscow.
Open Source Projects
Yandex shares some of its technology with the public, which is called "open source":
- In 2009, Yandex started working on MatrixNet. This is a special computer program for building machine learning models.
- In July 2017, they released the CatBoost library to the public. This library uses the Matrixnet program. It's even used by other companies like JetBrains and CloudFlare.
- In 2012, Yandex began working on understanding natural speech. In October 2023, they introduced Yandex SpeechKit. This technology can recognize and create speech.
- In 2022, the company shared the code for its YDB database system. This system is used in Alice, Yandex.Go, and Yandex Market.
- In 2023, Yandex shared the code for YTsaurus, a platform for working with large amounts of data.
Security and Privacy
On June 1, 2017, Yandex closed its offices in Ukraine. This happened after Ukrainian security services looked into the company. They said Yandex was collecting Ukrainian users' data and sending it to Russian security agencies. Yandex said they did nothing wrong. In May 2017, all Yandex services were banned in Ukraine.
In 2018, Yandex faced a cyberattack that tried to steal information about how users log in.
In 2019, news reports said Yandex refused a request from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). The FSB wanted special keys to read private emails and cloud storage data. Yandex said this would harm user privacy. Later, Yandex and the FSB reached an agreement where Yandex would provide needed data without giving away the special keys.
In February 2021, Yandex said that one of its employees allowed unauthorized access to almost 5,000 Yandex email accounts.
In January 2023, a large amount of Yandex service data was shared online.
In June 2023, a Moscow court fined Yandex for not sharing user information with the Federal Security Service.
News and Media
In April 2014, a film about Yandex's history called Startup was released.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia in 2020, Yandex made its home coronavirus testing service free in Moscow.
In 2022, after the conflict between Russia and Ukraine began, some reports said that Yandex-delivered ads promoted incorrect information about the war. Many articles shown in Yandex's news were from Russian state-owned sources. Yandex stated that its news is generated automatically by an algorithm from registered media sources.
In March 2022, Yandex started looking for ways to sell its news and blogging platforms. This was because of the conflict and increased government control over media. Yandex wanted to focus on services that could not be seen as political.
In September 2022, Yandex sold its media businesses. News, Zen, and the main page yandex.ru were transferred to VK Holding. After this, ya.ru became Yandex's new main page for search, mail, and other services.
In November 2022, Yandex's leaders talked about possibly changing the company's structure. The main part of the business might become a separate group of companies in Russia, keeping the Yandex brand. The international parts of some businesses would be separate under the Dutch Yandex N.V. company.
In March 2023, the NASDAQ stock exchange said it might remove Yandex from its listings. Yandex appealed this, saying it planned to separate its Russian and foreign businesses. Trading in Yandex shares is still paused.
In May 2023, Yandex announced that some investors were interested in buying a share in the company. These investors would not be able to control the company's daily activities. The top management of Yandex would keep control.
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