Yandex Launches Taxi Search Service

Internet, October 26, 2011. Yandex provides a taxi for its users. There is no longer any need to make lots of phone calls to arrange a taxi. Yandex.Taxi sends its user’s booking request to all of its partner taxi services and quickly finds an available car. The service is currently in beta and finds taxis only for users in Moscow.

The wait for a taxi normally takes as long as half an hour, and even much longer at peak times. To reduce the waiting time, Yandex.Taxi looks at the cars of all of its partner taxi service providers and sends a booking request to the car nearest to the client. After the booking has been confirmed, the client can track their taxi right on the city map.

Currently, Yandex.Taxi partners with eleven taxi service providers in Moscow, including some of the largest. The Yandex.Taxi partners include Taxi@SMS, XXL-TAXI, City Mobil, GLOBUS TAXI, Taxi Pilot, Ritm Taxi, Millenium Taxi, NowTaxi.ru, Taxik, TK November and Komandir. The service will soon expand to add more taxi companies. Right now, at any given moment Yandex has about 1,000 cars ready to respond to the client’s request.

“As the service will grow and add more partners, we expect to reduce waiting times to less than 15 minutes, which is comparable with what it takes to go out to a busy street and stop a gypsy cab. But, with the Yandex.Taxi service which partners only with the licensed taxi service providers, the client gets a reliable driver, a good car and a safe trip,” says Tigran Khudaverdyan, Head of Web Portal and Mobile Services at Yandex.

The new service allows the users to choose a price category (economy, standard or business) for their booking and add special requirements, such as a non-smoking car, for instance. The tariffs depend on the taxi service provider who maintains full responsibility for the customer service delivery.

Currently, Yandex.Taxi is available as a mobile application for iPhone and for Android-based smartphones. The desktop version of the service will be released in the near future. Yandex.Taxi also has plans for launching in other large cities across Russia. The Yandex.Taxi app is available for download at the App Store or in the Android Market. To read more about the service and watch a demo, go to the company blog (in Russian).

About Yandex

Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) is the leading internet company in Russia, operating the country’s most popular search engine and the most visited website. Yandex also operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey. Yandex’s mission is to answer any question internet users may have.

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Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com