History of Yandex

Yandex.Maps opened, with a single map of Europe and detailed maps of three cities — Moscow, St Petersburg and Kiev. They could be used not only to search for addresses, but also museums, cinemas and other establishments.

With blogging being hugely popular, Yandex launched a search engine for blogs and internet forums — a useful tool for finding out what people had to say on a variety of subjects. It also had ranking of trending topics, which, however, had to be removed due to fraudulent manipulation. The removal sparked a small protest outside Yandex’s office. The blog search engine continued, in one form or another, until 2014.

Yandex worked on promoting wireless internet access and, together with service providers, announced the Yandex.WiFi program. Yandex provided informational support to cafes and restaurants that agreed to offer free WiFi, while providers set up the infrastructure for them on favourable terms.