Yandex
More info
- Creator
- Arkady Volozh, Ilya Segalovich
- Released
- 1997
- Type
- Search engine, internet company
The Russian search engine that beat Google at home and was then split in two by geopolitics.
Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich launched the search engine in 1997. Russian morphology, with its many inflected forms, was a hard problem for American engines, and Yandex stayed ahead of Google in Russia for a long time. It expanded into taxis, maps, mail and deliveries, and listed on Nasdaq in 2011, formally through a Dutch parent company.
Developers mostly know Yandex through its open source: ClickHouse, the gradient boosting library CatBoost and the connection pooler Odyssey. After the invasion of Ukraine the structure became untenable. In 2024 the Dutch entity sold the entire Russian business to Russian buyers and carried on as Nebius, selling AI cloud capacity in Europe.