Yandex is a Russian multinational technology company providing Internet-

related products and services. It has audience primarily in Russia but it’s also
widely-used in other countries of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe. I’d
like to tell you some words about the history of this company and their path to the
name of indeed international brand.
In 1993 Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich invented the word “Yandex” to
describe their search technologies. The name stood for “Yet Another iNDEXer”. In
1997 Yandex.ru search engine was launched and presented in Moscow. In 1998
Yandex launched contextual advertisement on its search engine and it led to big
profits for the company. Yandex is still the leader on the market of contextual
advertisement in Russia, especially while their contender – Google left this market.
Yandex captured bigger and bigger sectors of Russian internet and in 2005
decided to expand. In September 2005 they opened an office in Ukraine and
launched Yandex.ua. Two years later they customized engine for Ukrainian users
and also opened its development center in Kyiv. It was the first step of becoming
an international company.
Then, in 2008 they announced the formation of Yandex Labs in Silicon
Valley. From this moment they were trying to get a sector of the Internet
worldwide. In 2010 Yandex launched an English-only web search engine and three
years later added an English user interface to its translation mobile app.
In 2011 they also opened an office in Istanbul and launched a search engine
and a range of other services in Turkey. In 2015 Yandex became a title sponsor of
one of the biggest Turkish football clubs – Fenerbahce. It also showed that Yandex
was interested in the market of this country. Fenerbahce is highly popular among
Turkish people and for instance another former sponsor of this is CocaCola.
Also Yandex opened its research centers in many other countries: such as
Israel, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan. By 2020 Yandex
took the 49th place in the rating of the most popular websites in the world.
In many ways, this is the result of the gradual development of technology
and the opening up of new markets to distribute products. Yandex is one of the
most advanced IT companies not only in Russia, but also in the world and can
really be a reason for our pride. Unfortunately, now Yandex has some problems
connected with sanctions. Yandex is the largest IT-company in Russia and
evidently it couldn’t avoid sanctions. But it still has a lot of perspectives and I hope
that their development won’t stop because of the situation in the world.