History of Yandex

In May, Yandex went public with an IPO on the NASDAQ stock market in New York. The company’s shares trade under the ticker YNDX.

The company ventured beyond ex-Soviet territory, opening the portal yandex.com.tr in Turkey on September 20. It offers Yandex.Search, Yandex.Maps, Yandex.Mail and other services for Turkish users.

Yandex presented its new technology, Crypta, which can classify different groups of users on the basis of their online behaviour. For example, it can distinguish adult homemakers from teenagers. The technology is used in the development of new products for advertisers.

The company organised a competitive programming championship, Yandex.Algorithm. It started small, but the following year it was held on a new, international level. Three thousand programmers from 84 countries participated in Algorithm-2013, with the final taking place in the Vladimir Palace, St. Petersburg.

Yandex.Translate was launched, offering statistical machine translation — that is, translation that doesn’t depend on rules and dictionaries, but on statistics. In 2011, translate.yandex.ru could translate texts from English or Ukrainian into Russian and vice versa; later the number of language pairs grew to be much larger.
Several new mobile applications were released in the same year — Yandex.Search, Yandex.Mail, Yandex.Money and Yandex.Market — all supplementary to already-existing web services. The Yandex.Taxi application was a whole different story, starting out as a mobile app, with the web version appearing only in the following year.