Our goal is to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world.

Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Our goal is to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world. Since 1997, we have delivered world-class, locally relevant search and information services. Additionally, we have developed market-leading on-demand transportation services, navigation products, and other mobile applications for millions of consumers across the globe.

Yandex’s history began in the early 1990s – long before the company was founded. Yandex as a company appeared in 2000, three years after the launch of the web portal yandex.ru. At that point there were only 25 names on the new company's payroll and all data Yandex processed could fit on a single server. Now Yandex has offices and representations in ten countries, employing over 18,000 people. In our home market, Russia, our share of all search traffic is 61.0% (Yandex.Radar, Q1 2022). We also operate in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey.

Almost half of our revenues are derived from contextual advertising, which delivers ads for products and services based on what web users are looking for. Our Yandex.Direct service was the first and is the largest system for the placement of text-based ads in Russia. In addition to serving advertisements on our own search results pages, we run ads on thousands of third-party websites that make up our Yandex Advertising Network.

Our company became profitable in 2002 and its revenues have been continually growing ever since. In May 2011 Yandex went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange, under the ticker YNDX.

Traditionally, the task of any search engine was to find information on the internet. But now that role has expanded. The internet can no longer be seen as separate from the reality surrounding us, and search engines now have to look for all kinds of things, not just online but all over the offline world as well. And they don’t just look for things and find them – they also give helpful suggestions in any real-life situation. Contemporary search understands the desires of every individual user, as well as the reality in which the user exists. That’s why it can give suitable suggestions for each person, individually – including what to read, where to go for a meal, what music to listen to, how to get home in the fastest possible way, where to book the cheapest flights, and much more.

Search always was and still remains Yandex’s core product, but now we have a broader understanding of its role: that of a universal aid, an assistant, a guide to everything that surrounds us. It’s about giving the right suggestion at the right place and time, help making a choice, and the possibility to get things done.

All of Yandex’s products are designed to make people’s lives easier and better. Each helps users to do something that once seemed impossible. A few years ago we couldn’t imagine reading a text in an unfamiliar language without looking up every word in a dictionary, or having the address of the nearest pharmacy at our fingertips anywhere in a city, or getting a taxi without having to wait. Now, all this is completely normal – all these feats have become simple tasks that we take for granted.

That’s what Yandex does – it creates services for people. Services with both, a deep understanding of the user’s interests and profound knowledge of the users’ reality. Services that change life as we know it and help people achieve their goals.

The concept of the ‘happiness of the user’ is crucial for us. Among other things it means that how useful and user-friendly a product is matters more than how much money we can make from it. If a product or service that we create is liked by people, its business model will follow. Provided that the user’s interests are also taken into account.

Our work is based on a technological approach and statistical verification of all substantial changes to our products or services. Any change must be objectively justified to help us understand whether it is really beneficial for users.

Yandex is a technological company. Our products and services are based on complex, unique technologies that aren’t easily replicated. That’s what enables us to do things that once would’ve sounded like magic.

Practically all of Yandex’s services use machine learning – including in the ranking of search results, serving online advertisements, and performing translations. In 2009 Yandex developed and implemented its own machine learning method – MatrixNet.

Thanks to speech recognition technology, users can communicate verbally with the Yandex.Navigator street navigation app instead of typing in addresses manually. The users of our Yandex.Mail service can quickly find certain e-mails in their accounts – such as tickets, appointment or meeting notifications, information about discounts – all automatically marked by our fact extraction technology. We use our own computer vision methods to find similar images. In 2011, we launched a service for statistical machine translation – one of only three of this kind that currently exist in the world.

Our technologies and services run on tens of thousands of servers. We have Russia’s largest network for data storage and processing. We share our data processing capacities with our partners working in, among other things, nuclear research and geological exploration.

Our team of specialists represents many scientific disciplines, including mathematics, data analysis, programming, linguistics, and many others. Besides working on products and technologies at Yandex, some of our experts teach, lecture and train students and young specialists.

We run our own educational programs. The Yandex School of Data Analysis, offering free courses for university graduates and senior students, has been running since 2007. The school trains specialists in internet data processing, data analysis and fact extraction. The school’s graduates find employment at Yandex and many other companies. Yandex also has schools for project managers, user interface developers and other specialists in IT. We also partner with Russia’s leading research centres and universities, including the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Higher School of Economics. Yandex’s experts give lectures to high school students. We sponsor a number of school contests in computer programming, mathematics and linguistics.

Russia's largest technology conference, Yet another Conference, which is organised by Yandex every year, gathers industry experts from all over the world. We also run scientific conferences on machine learning, as well as seminars, lectures, workshops and master classes for those who wish to make or have already made a career in the internet industry.

Yandex affects the internet ecosystem as much as any other key player on the market. We understand that it is our responsibility to make sure that our influence is beneficial. One of our core values is enhancing and protecting the interests and human rights of our users. To serve the interests of our users, we need an open, diverse environment with a multitude of quality resources.

We develop products and services for users in cooperation with all market participants, taking all interests into consideration. We aim to provide platform solutions and transparent conditions that enable consumers and businesses to enjoy the reciprocal benefits provided by the internet. However, much like the offline world, various parties interests can often be at odds.

Within the internet ecosystem, Yandex does not regulate the internet but runs multiple platforms that aggregate and enable users to transmit content online. We aim to operate these services by referring to the guidance of various frameworks of international standards for human rights such as ICCPR.

We believe that part of our role in maintaining a balanced online ecosystem is to respect users’ freedom of expression and privacy online. Both individual users and organizations sometimes challenge Yandex to remove or block content on our platforms that they consider harmful or unlawful. Ultimately, we aim to protect freedom of expression and anonymity online.

While Yandex prioritizes users’ rights, we must also comply with all local laws and regulations when it comes to content removal and other information requests. Yandex does not provide any priority to any private entities or governmental organizations for consideration when flagging content to be restricted for violating company or other rules. When a user’s account or access to content has been restricted, the relevant Yandex support service typically sends a message to users providing the reason for the restriction and the user's next possible actions.

As part of our commitment to online human rights, we welcome both employees and users to report any issues relating to privacy, security, and freedom of expression online to Yandex. Users, please visit our support page where you can navigate to the proper form and submit more detailed information about issues in the feedback form. Your request will be forwarded to the appropriate team and Yandex support will contact you via the submitted contact email. Both employees and users may also confidentially submit questions and complaints regarding freedom of expression online and privacy here.