Yandex Isn’t Just “Yet Another Indexer”

While Google dominates the search engine market in most parts of the world, there is one company they have to beat in order to get a bigger piece of the pie in the Russian search engine market.

Yandex is a Russian internet company which runs the most popular search engine in Russia. The name Yandex comes from the phrase “Yet another indexer.” However, in reality, it’s more than that; it is a search engine that has kept Google’s growing popularity around the world at bay, holding a 65% share of the search engine market in Russia. It comes as Mozilla Firefox’s default search engine and also provides users with innovative functions such as traffic maps, predictive search, and a portrait search which helps people find a particular face in a photo.

The search engine was launched by CompTek in 1997 and the standalone company was founded 3 years later by Arkady Volozh.  In April 2012, Yandex was able to generate 60.2% of Russia’s search traffic and the company’s sites have attracted 46 million unique hits in March 2012 alone. The company also operates in other countries including Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. A wholly owned subsidiary called Yandex Labs operates in the Bay Area in San Francisco.

Yandex develops its own technologies and fosters other companies to develop technologies for them through their Yandex.Start program. Yandex systematically works with these companies to develop the technology needed to expand and improve Yandex’ services. It is through this program that the company was able to acquire WebVisor which developed behavior analysis technology, as well as Loginza, a single sign-in service.

The company’s search platform and other innovative services have earned itself a lot of accolades and recognition from industry insiders including online media outlet FastCompany which named Yandex as one of the Most Innovative Companies of 2011 for its prowess in search and for being able to stand its ground against internet giants.