Starting this month, Android users in Russia are presented with a choice screen in Chrome Mobile browser allowing them to select their preferred search engine.  Previously, Google search was the default search on Chrome on all Android devices; a different search engine could only be selected by accessing the application settings.  Now, with the most recent version of Chrome Mobile (v.60), users are prompted to select their default search engine when the Chrome app launches.  This is a huge milestone for Russian users and something we have been working towards for a long time.

Yandex is proud to announce Yandex.Radar, a new analytics tool that provides the most accurate search engine and browser usage data available for the internet market in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey. Yandex.Radar allows webmasters to quickly and easily segment search engine and browser usage data by device type and operating system. For example, users can analyze Yandex Browser on different platforms.

Recent developments in machine learning have accelerated its transition from a computer science research area to a technology that drives numerous customer applications. One of the most buzzed about methods leading this transition is deep learning. At Yandex, our homegrown deep neural networks are an important part of the machine learning portfolio that helps sustain our market-leading performance in search, speech recognition and synthesis, vision applications and machine translation. At the same time, we’ve also integrated many other forms of machine learning across our products and services. 

This is the letter Tigran Khudaverdyan, CEO of Yandex.Taxi, sent to the team earlier today:

Yandex is excited to announce it is ramping up its cloud platform initiative, Yandex.Cloud. Over the last year we have been exploring and experimenting with a cloud initiative that would combine our network of state-of-the-art data centers across Western Europe and Russia, our developer talent, and our deep expertise in machine learning and data mining to provide businesses a high-performance cloud computing platform. Today we are excited to take the next step and further expand on the Yandex.Cloud vision.

Jane Zavalishina is the CEO of Yandex Data Factory, a spin-off of Yandex founded in 2014 to provide machine learning solutions to enterprises. In this post, Jane explains how YDF’s business has evolved since its launch, and why industrial AI is now in focus of its strategy.

Yandex’s on-demand transportation service Yandex.Taxi unveils its autonomous car project. The prototype of a self-driving car the company has developed is a step towards a comprehensive set of driverless technologies for application across a wide range of industries.

Yandex.Zen, an AI-powered personally targeted content feed based on the interests of each individual end user, was built to help mobile users on the go and in the moment with contextually relevant information. Through partnerships with Yandex.Zen, smartphone manufacturers can provide this personalized experience for their users to set their devices apart.  Today we are glad to announce we are enhancing device differentiation for another global partner, Micromax Informatics, the world’s 10th largest mobile brand.

In this blog post, I would like to share my reflections on the landmark settlement between Google and the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) (you can read the FAS press release here).

Yandex.Taxi’s commitment to high quality service and convenient options has led to significant growth over the last year.  Yandex.Taxi completed 16.2 million rides in December 2016 alone, growing at an annualized rate of 452% from December 2015 to 2016. Last year Yandex.Taxi also reached the significant milestone of 100 million total rides.

International Women’s Day is a global celebration dedicated to women’s achievements inside and outside of the workplace. With 17 offices across nine countries, we’re proud to recognize the Yandex women around the world helping us build the next generation of intelligent products and services powered by machine learning.

Yandex proudly announces the creation of our new Machine Intelligence and Research (MIR) Division. The MIR division will function as a centralized, cross-functional unit to accelerate innovation and unify our core machine learning technologies. The MIR division will also transfer cutting-edge research from our various research teams into Yandex products and services.

Yandex unveiled a new service for businesses advertising their products on the company’s websites, as well as websites in the Yandex Advertising Network, at its annual e-marketing conference Yac/m. The new service, Yandex.Audience, allows companies use their own customer information to segment audiences for hyper-targeted advertising, as well as target their ads to existing groups of customers to boost upselling campaigns, improve retention, and increase average spend.

Yandex builds personalised content recommendation technology Zen into Yandex Browser on all platforms in 24 countries and 15 languages. Based on the latest developments in artificial intelligence research, Zen recommendation technology uses the company’s vast global web index to pick stories, images, videos and other content for each individual user and offer it them right in the new tab of Yandex Browser.

Yandex kits out its browser with built-in domain name system protection technology to safeguard all users of Yandex Browser against DNS spoofing. This is the first time a browser comes with a DNS security technology on board.