Yandex
Yandex LLC (Russian: Яндекс, tr. Yandeks, IPA: [ˈjandəks]) is a Russian multinational technology company[5] providing Internet-related products and services, including an Internet search engine called Yandex Search, launched in 1997, information services, e-commerce, transportation, maps and navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising.[6][2] Yandex Holding Company was incorporated in 2000. As of 2016, it primarily served audiences in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey and countries with a significant Russian-speaking population.[7]
This article is about the company. For its search engine, see Yandex Search.
Native name
Яндекс
- 23 September 1997 (Yandex search launched by CompTek)
- 2007 (reincorporation of holding company in the Netherlands)
- Arkady Volozh
- Arkady Borkovsky
- Ilya Segalovich
Worldwide
- Arkady Volozh (1997–2022)
- Tigran Khudaverdyan (2019–2022)
- Artyom Savinovsky (CEO)[1]
356,171,000,000 Russian ruble (2021) 
28,461,000,000 Russian ruble (2023)
21,775,000,000 Russian ruble (2023)
786,628,000,000 Russian ruble (2023)
10,227 (2020)
Yandex N.V., Schiphol Boulevard 165, Schiphol Airport, Netherlands
As of 2017, the firm was the largest technology company in Russia.[8] It had more than 30 offices worldwide in 2018.[9] 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, and is the third largest search engine worldwide after Google and Bing.[10]
Yandex LLC's holding company, Yandex N.V., is a naamloze vennootschap (Dutch public limited company)[11] with its head office listed at an address of a virtual office in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.[12] Yandex N.V. is listed on Nasdaq and has a secondary listing on the Moscow Exchange, although trading in Yandex shares on Nasdaq was suspended in February 2022.[13]
In February 2024, Yandex N.V. announced the sale of the majority of its Russia-based assets to a consortium of Russia-based investors.[14][15]
Offices[edit]
In 2008, Yandex opened a technology and business development unit called Yandex Labs in Silicon Valley.[25] In 2011, the Istanbul office was launched together with the company's web portal in Turkey in 2011.[52]
In 2012, the company opened its first European office in Lucerne to serve advertising clients in the EU.[85] Its first research and development office in Europe started operating in Berlin in 2014.[86] In 2015, the company's Shanghai office was launched to facilitate work with Chinese companies operating on the Russian language market.[87]
As of 2018 it had more than 30 offices worldwide.[9]
In December 2021 a new location in Prague was added to accommodate the company's rapidly expanding crowdsourcing, routing, cloud computing, ridesharing and weather forecasting teams.[88]
As of 2021, Yandex had offices in 12 countries.[89]
Security[edit]
On June 1, 2017, Yandex closed its offices in Kyiv and Odesa, Ukraine after the Security Service of Ukraine raided the offices and accused the company of illegally collecting Ukrainian users' data and sending it to Russian security agencies.[125] The firm denied any wrongdoing. In May 2017, all Yandex services were banned in Ukraine by Presidential Decree No. 133/2017.[126]
In October and November 2018, Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the Regin malware, aimed at stealing technical information from its research and development unit on how users were authenticated.[127] An investigation by Kaspersky Lab attributed the hacks to Five Eyes intelligence agencies.[127]
In June 2019, RBC News reported that Yandex had refused a request by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) under the Yarovaya law to surrender encryption keys that could decrypt the private data of its e-mail service and cloud storage users. The company argued that it was impossible to comply with the relevant law without compromising its users' privacy.[128] Maxim Akimov, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, said that the government would take action to relieve FSB pressure on the company.[129] Alexander Zharov, head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, subsequently said that Yandex and the FSB had reached an agreement where the company would provide the required data without handing over the encryption keys.[130]
In February 2021 Yandex admitted that one of their system administrators with access rights to Yandex's email service had enabled unauthorized access, leading to almost 5,000 Yandex email inboxes being compromised.[131]
On January 25, 2023, a leaked archive with approx. 44 GB of Yandex services was shared on BreachForums via BitTorrent.[132][133]
In June 2023 Yandex was fined by the Moscow court for its repeated refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.[134]
News and media[edit]
In April 2014, a film about the history of Yandex called Startup was released.[135]
On 20 April 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, Yandex made its home coronavirus testing service free of charge for all residents of Moscow and its surroundings, extending it to other regions in the future. Previously, it announced the launch of the service on 16 April.[136]
In late March 2022, Yandex was the subject of a Financial Times investigation that had been initiated by the nonprofit organization Me2B Alliance as part of an application auditing campaign led by researcher Zach Edwards. Edwards and four expert researchers, including Cher Scarlett, a former Apple security engineer, found that a software development kit (SDK) called AppMetrica, a product of Yandex, was harvesting data from more than 52,000 applications such as a user's device fingerprint and IP address and storing it in Russia on Yandex's servers, which they said due to Russian law, and the nature of SDKs, could be accessed by Russian authorities without their knowledge and used to identify them. Yandex said of identification by the data collected: "Although theoretically possible, in practice it is extremely hard to identify users based solely on such information collected." Of authority requests for data they said: "Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down."[137][138]
According to Meduza investigation published on 5 May 2022, since 2016 the top-5 news on the Yandex's main page are formed on the basis of a secret list of Russian media approved by Presidential Administration of Russia, which includes only pro-Kremlin media. Yandex stated that the highest-ranked news on its main page is generated automatically through its algorithm. Because of laws around news aggregators, only news received from registered media sources may appear on it.[139]
In March 2022, Yandex began to look for ways to offload its news aggregator and blogging-recommendation platform as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine as well as the Kremlin's increased control of the media and freedom of expression.[140] Yandex sought to focus on something that "under no circumstances can be politicized in any way. Under the current conditions, it is impossible to continue developing content and information services that affect a large number of people."[141]
In September 2022, Yandex sold its media assets. The company transferred News, Zen, and also the main page yandex.ru to VK Holding.[140]
