History

YandexGPT is a generative neural network trained on Yandex supercomputers. Right from the gate it could write texts and offer ideas, and by the end of the year it had learned to take into account context, ask clarifying questions, and make short summaries—and it would become the progenitor of a whole line of language models.

This new service makes it possible to search for information in handwritten and printed archival documents: parish registers, census tales, reference books, newspapers, and more. The decoding is performed by a neural network that can analyze different handwritings, recognize obsolete letters, and figure out the huge strips of small print in newspaper layouts.

The Shedevrum app, which creates images and videos based on text queries, was released: just tell it exactly what you want, and the YandexART neural network takes care of the rest. It will also be useful in Yandex services for business, for example, to illustrate advertisements in Yandex Direct.

Robotaxi testing began in the Moscow district of Yasenevo in the summer. Passengers were taken between about forty pick-up and drop-off points. Over three months of testing, these autonomous vehicles made over 1,700 trips.

Yandex’s lineup has been expanded in new form factors. Our Station Midi features a compact body and powerful sound. TV Station and TV Station Pro combine the capabilities of smart speakers and a TV. Station Duo Max is a speaker with a touch screen that can be controlled by both speech and touch.

Yandex’s contribution to open source was especially significant this year. The company opened the source code of the fault-tolerant YDB DBMS and the DivKit, userver, and Yatagan frameworks. The list of open source projects was also expanded by the YaLM 100B neural network for generating and processing texts, which at that time was the largest public domain GPT-like model.

Yandex sold News and Zen to VK. The new owners acquired the address yandex.ru, and we changed our main page for the first time ever. Now you can find us at ya.ru. At its core, it’s still a search engine, but it continues to be the entry point to Yandex services. The Alice voice assistant has also been residing at ya.ru since December.

Yandex has revealed the prototype for the next generation of Maps. Buildings, roads, and other objects in the city are shown in realistic detail, and drivers were the first to try it out. First in Moscow and then in other large cities, roads on Maps began to be displayed with all the signs, parking spaces, and safety islands.

Robots now work alongside humans at the Market warehouse in Sofyino. The first was Spectro, a robot inventory inspector. It scans shelves and enters data into the accounting system, registering what is stored where. Spectro takes inventory much faster than people. Robots will soon be assigned other tasks at the warehouse.

Yandex has introduced its own rental scooter with two shock absorbers and a large ground clearance for comfort even on the most uneven roads, as well as a wide but short platform for additional safety. There are also hooks for bags and a smartphone holder.

Yandex’s Chervonenkis joined the list of the world’s twenty most powerful supercomputers, and our Chervonenkis, Galushkin, and Lyapunov computers, all named after Russian specialists in machine learning theory and computer science, topped the Russian top twenty list.

Yandex launched automatic voice-over translation. This was both a technological breakthrough and an important step towards tearing down language barriers. Users can now watch films, talk shows, and videos in languages they don’t know. Translation from English appeared first, followed by French, Spanish, and German.

As the world was adjusting to life during a pandemic, with medical professionals working around the clock at the front line of the coronavirus crisis, Yandex launched the “Helping Hand” project to support doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers, as well as anyone else in a difficult situation. The project provided free transportation for doctors, food packages, and coronavirus tests. Anyone could contribute to the project by making a donation. Yandex also launched the Self-Isolation Index at the start of the pandemic. The index showed when there were too many people outside and whether it was safe to leave the house.

Yandex spent the lockdown working on delivery services, launching “click-to-delivery,” with which orders are first brought to the Yandex Lavka warehouse and then delivered in 15 to 20 minutes (or whenever is convenient). Taxis began delivering small parcels, and Eats was given robot couriers.

The company launched a text analysis technology based on neural networks/transformers that perfectly solve problems related to natural language processing, but require huge amounts of computing resources. Thanks to YATI, Yandex has become far better at assessing the semantic connection between queries and the content of web documents.

This major update allows the search engine to respond more accurately and faster, take into account signals from assessors, and use explanations from Q, the Q& A service acquired in 2019. Now you can solve hyperlocal problems: find what you need in a specific area, block, or even building.

Yandex created its Educational Initiative, with an investment of five billion rubles in training IT personnel and graduating 100,000 specialists in three years. The Practicum online training service and a laboratory at MIPT were also put into operation, and a scientific prize named after Ilya Segalovich was established in January.

To help people living in large cities enjoy their lives a little bit more, Yandex launches two services at the start of this year. The car sharing service Yandex.Drive, available through an app for iOS or Android devices, offers its users a choice of vehicles in various classes, flexible tariffs and a 24-hour customer support service. The order delivery service Yandex.Eats, also available through the iOS and Android apps, provides delivery from a large network of restaurants and cafes in the shortest possible time, thanks to Yandex’s order distribution technology.

Yandex rolls out a large update to its search engine, which includes over a thousand improvements. The key updates help users complete their tasks as quickly as possible, choose the most reliable sources of information, discover media content and save it in their personal collections. Yandex also updates its ranking algorithm to put more weight on website quality. The updated version of the company’s search engine is named ‘Andromeda’.

The company open-sourced CatBoost, a new machine learning library based on gradient boosting. CatBoost is the successor to the machine learning algorithm MatrixNet and has numerous advantages over its predecessor: its predictions are more precise, it is more resistant to overfitting and, most importantly, it supports non-numeric features — dog breeds or cloud types, for example — that is, it can learn from different forms of data that have not been preprocessed and converted into digital form.

Palekh was replaced by the Korolev algorithm, also based on a neural network. While Palekh compared the meaning of a request and the title of a web page, Korolev analyzes the entire page and takes into account the meaning of other requests that lead to it, making Yandex search more accurate in answering complex questions.

Yandex Translate was updated with a hybrid translation system: its statistical model was supplemented with neural network translation technology. Turbo pages became available in Search, Zen, and News, making mobile devices load a lot faster. Weather was provided with beautiful maps of the entire planet.

Several new services and products for business were launched this year. Yandex Auto was developed, which combines services for drivers and is integrated into a car’s multimedia systems. Yandex Connect, a service for collaborations, made its debut.

The Palekh algorithm, which searches web pages not by keywords, but by meaning, was released. It is based on neural networks and designed to answer rare and unique queries, which make up about a third of the entire flow, forming a “long tail,” like that of the firebird commonly depicted in Palekh miniature paintings, hence the name.

Yandex Lyceum opened in Kaluga, Penza, Saratov, and Tambov for 8th to 9th grade students who want to learn programming. Classes are held twice a week with teachers from local schools and universities. The project is implemented jointly with regional education and IT authorities.

The Yandex Zen personalized recommendations feed became available in Browser and Yandex Launcher. Providing articles, videos, pictures, and anything else a user may need, Zen uses the Yandex global search index, as well as AI (in particular, computer vision and natural language processing technologies).

Yandex starts a program aimed at developing and supporting educational web projects in history, literature, linguistics, art and philosophy. The first project to receive the program’s support was Mikhail Zygar’s “1917. Svobodnaya istoriya”.

The year also saw the release of an app for making doctor’s appointments, Yandex.Health, as well as new services for business — Yandex.Telephony, a virtual automated customer communications system, and Yandex.Audience, which helps create target audience segments for ad campaigns. Meanwhile, Yandex.Taxi grew in popularity among corporate clients.

Yandex developed its own weather forecasting technology. Called Meteum, it combines classic weather forecasting models and machine learning technologies and provides local forecasts for a specific area or even building. Machine learning lets one significantly increase the accuracy of the forecast.

Direct has developed a Vickrey–Clark–Groves auction: with this new model, the click price grows proportionally to traffic, and advertisers can get the maximum number of clicks at the best price. The ranking of ads within ad units has also been changed so that users see the ads they need to give them what they want.

Yandex Transport, which shows you where your bus, trolleybus, or tram is currently located and when it will arrive at your stop, graduated from beta testing. Yandex Parking for drivers and Radio for all types of audiophiles were also released.

The Yandex Delivery logistics aggregator started this summer, helping online stores deliver from Moscow to beyond. Another service for businesses came out that fall: an automated news agency that broadcasts updates about traffic jams, weather, and search interests.

Yandex opened Yandex Data Factory, an international project providing big data solutions to corporate and enterprise clients. Yandex’s technologies — machine learning, image and voice recognition, deep neural networks, and natural voice processing — help businesses utilise masses of accumulated data for their benefit.

Yandex and Moscow’s Higher School of Economics jointly opened a computer science faculty, which prepares specialists in two areas — software engineering, and applied mathematics and informatics. Winners and place-getters of school olympiads rush to enrol in numbers never before seen at any other faculty at the HSE.

A mobile news app was released alongside two new services — Yandex.City and Yandex.Master. The former helped users find and choose businesses and organisations until 2016, while the latter helped people find specialists for their domestic tasks and was closed a year after launch.

At the YaC-2013 conference, Yandex presented its own voice recognition technology SpeechKit and an API for working with it. This technology would be used in many of Yandex’s mobile applications, as well as in products by outside developers. A year later, the company released a cloud service for voice recognition and an app that writes dictated text and reads out what’s written.

Yandex became an associate member of CERN openlab. The company had begun working with the European Organization for Nuclear Research a couple of years earlier. Yandex provides the physicists with computing resources and its proprietary data processing technologies, including the machine learning technology MatrixNet. Later Yandex and the School of Data Analysis participate in several CERN experiments.

Yandex opened Yandex.Store, an app store for Android. Positioned as international, it invites app-buyers and developers from around the world. At its launch the store offered more than 5,000 paid and free apps, user-friendly search, and virus protection. Purchases can be paid by bank card, and by text message in Russia.

You can’t surf the web without a browser, so the long-awaited release of Yandex Browser was a big deal. The Russian version came out first, followed by versions for Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Turkey.

Yandex can take into account a user’s personal interests when offering tips and generating results, and it relies on its knowledge about the person to do so: what they usually ask, what sites they visit, and whether they need answers in English. The more someone uses it, the more accurate it is.

Yandex launched Real Time Bidding, an auction for media advertising. Advertising platforms act as sellers, and advertising placement systems representing the interests of advertisers act as buyers. Bidding for an ad impression takes a split second, occurring as the user opens a web page.

Another big event that year was the launch of Navigator: with updated maps of hundreds of cities, along with routing that takes into account traffic jams and voice guidance, it can be used at no cost. This year as a whole was a good one for mobile products: Music, Translate, Direct and Yandex Shell were all released.

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 organized a competitive programming championship. At first it was small-scale, but the next year it reached international levels: 3,000 programmers from 84 countries participated in Yandex Algorithm 2013, and the finals were held in the Vladimir Palace in St. Petersburg.

Yandex Translate, a machine translation that relies on statistics rather than rules and dictionaries, was launched. In 2011, at translate.yandex.ru, texts could be translated from English or Ukrainian into Russian and vice versa, with many more language pairs soon to come.

A portal for Belarus was released, with all the services targeted at a local audience. The search engine takes into account the morphology of the Belarusian language, and that same year, Yandex opened a Partner Service Center so that Belarusian sites could participate in the Yandex Advertising Network and receive earnings in Belarusian rubles.

Yandex has its own antivirus technology based on behavioral analysis, and it can detect sites with viruses that have not yet been included in antivirus databases. This technology was first used in the search engine, and then the Safe Browsing API appeared for third-party developers.

Yandex Start, a program for working with startups, was launched, and the company began looking for talented young people with good ideas and helped them get a leg up. The Tolstoy Startup Camp will open soon as part of Yandex Start, and it will be held several times a year.

Yandex held its first Yet another Conference (YaC). The event has changed its format several times, going from a small get-together for IT specialists to a large tech conference. Currently, YaC is a immense video story about Yandex products and technologies.

Yandex developed and implemented a new method of machine learning — MatrixNet. This technology was a real breakthrough, taking into account a far greater quantity of search factors and their combinations to significantly improve search quality.

Yandex began naming its search platforms, with each subsequent name beginning with the last letter of the previous one. Arzamas, a search that took into account the user’s region in 19 major Russian cities, came out in October. By the end of December, Snezhinsk was ready to be released, replaced by Krasnodar, then Reykjavik, and so on.

Yandex was released in Kazakhstan, and all of its main services can be found at yandex.kz: Mail, Maps, Auto, Schedules, News, and Market. The search engine takes into account the morphology of the Kazakh language and shows local sites in response to local queries, and users can choose which language they want to use.

The first regional commercial office opened in Yekaterinburg. Later the company opened such offices in other regions of Russia, allowing it to get closer to its clients. The commercial offices were tasked with helping local advertisers work with Yandex products.

Yandex began sharing its maps with site owners. With the help of the Yandex.Maps API, the maps could be incorporated into any resource. In the future Yandex would start offering developers and site owners many of its services and technologies.

Yandex Schedules and Yandex Video were launched and soon became extremely popular. The Ya Online instant messenger also took off, lasting until 2016.

Yandex’s School of Data Analysis provides free two-year courses to train specialists in data analysis and extracting information. After opening in Moscow, branches popped up in Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Minsk, and Kyiv (closed in 2017).

In 2007, local traffic in Russian regions was cheaper than federal traffic, so Yandex launched the Local Area Network program: the company stored its equipment in regions and rented dedicated channels so that people could use Yandex services at local rates.

Two new services were launched: Yandex.Fotki photo hosting service, which would merge into Yandex.Disk in 2018, and Ya.ru blog hosting service, which would close in 2014. The Yandex.Maps app, which included address and organization search, as well as a traffic layer, was also released this year. Yandex.Mail became also available in a PDA version.

The first software development office to open outside of Moscow opened in St Petersburg. Development offices would later appear in other cities to accommodate talented local teams.

Yandex.Maps began showing traffic jams. The “Traffic on the Map of Moscow” project showed the situation on the roads of the capital and the surrounding region. Red lines meant traffic jams, yellow conveyed congestion and green signified a clear ride. Yandex received data from the Smilink agency, which went on to become a part of the company. Later traffic maps were released for all cities in Russia and Ukraine, as well as Minsk and Istanbul.

Yandex’s services are a constant source of data about the internet and its users. This year Yandex released its first public research — The Blogosphere of the Russian Internet, based on data from the Blog Search service. Over time, Yandex began to regularly release research into the most diverse topics — from users’ search interests to traffic jams.

Yandex created a website informing users about providers that offered fast Internet at low prices. Over a hundred providers joined the program in the first few months, and many of them changed their terms of service and lowered prices.

The first step outside Russia was into Ukraine. The company opened a representative office in Odessa and began to develop services for the Ukrainian audience, launching yandex.ua in the same year.

The Yandex Advertising Network began to work, unifying sites that displayed Yandex.Direct advertisements. Ad revenues were divided — half to Yandex, half to the ad platform.

The year saw three new services launched: Yandex.Afisha, Yandex.Feeds and Yandex.Dictionaries.

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.

An important change took place at Yandex.Direct: the service switched to auction-based ad placement and payment per click. Advertisers no longer paid for ad displays, but for visitors — that is, click-through traffic to a site. Advertisers decided the price per click for themselves, as is the practice at an auction.

Yandex released the service Spamooborona, based on proprietary technology for protection against email spam. The technology took thousands of characteristics email messages into account to sift out spam. It was available to users of any email service, not only on Yandex.

Yandex.Images and Yandex.Market opened. At launch, Yandex.Images had 12 million pictures, while products from almost 150 internet stores were offered on Yandex.Market — books, films, cosmetics, footwear, clothing, stationery and toys. In the same year, Yandex and the PayCash group of companies together launched the payment system Yandex.Money.

The company released the Russian internet’s first contextual ad placement system, Yandex.Direct, allowing ads to be placed directly on Yandex without any intermediary. In its first year, it attracted more than 2,500 advertisers.

Yandex came up with its Internet Search Cup, allowing anyone compete to become “The Person Who Found Everything,” as well as win a significant cash prize. These competitions, which were licensed by Yandex to be held in other countries as well, became extremely popular and continued until 2008.

Yandex moved into its first office, once home to one the first series of Russia’s Academy of Sciences mainframe computers BESM, and then the Elbrus. Now Yandex had its own building, maintenance service and a server room. Up until that point, Yandex’s servers had been hosted by MTU Inform.

Yandex adds two new services — lingvo.yandex.ru and Yandex.Encylopedias. Later they became one — Yandex. Dictionaries, which ran until 2016.

For the first time, a contextual banner appeared on Yandex.ru. It said, “Ваша киска купила бы Cisco” (“Your kitty would buy Cisco”). Most important was the fact that this advertisement was contextual: Yandex started showing ads that helped users find what they were looking for. Contextual advertising would become the main business model of the company Yandex, which in 1998 did not yet exist.

A search engine called “Яndex-Web” was unveiled on September 23. To demonstrate how it worked with large masses of information, the whole Russian internet — then consisting of 5,000 sites containing about 4Gb of text — was indexed. People took turns on the demonstration computer, submitting questions and receiving answers. Yandex search was based on the morphology of the Russian language, considered the distance between words, and was capable of ranking documents at that point.

When Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh were developing their revolutionary search engine at the IT company Arkadia, it needed name. Something unique. So, Ilya grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down all the words that best described the essence of the program, and they always circled back to search and index. Then it came to them: Yandex, an abbreviation for yet another indexer. It was Arkady’s idea to replace the first two letters with the Russian letter Я, which is pronounced as ya and translates as the English word I.

Arkadia became part of CompTek, a computer and software supplier, and a few years later, CompTek founded Yandex.

With the birth of the site yandex.ru still several years ahead, the future founders of Yandex worked on search technologies in the small company “Arcadia. Intelligent Projects”, creating programs that searched the Bible, the Classifier of Goods and Services, and the International Classifier of Patents. The third program even achieved some sales success.