Mission — helping you solve your problems and reach your goals

The job of a search engine is to find what you’re looking for online, and it’s a job that’s getting more and more complex. The Internet is no longer separate from the reality around us, and the search engines of today scour the entire world for answers to our questions. More than that, they can give us hints about what to do in almost any real-life situation. Modern search engines know what we want, and they know what’s going on around us. They clue us into that new book we’ll devour at the beach, the hip Asian fusion restaurant we’d miss out on otherwise, that underground bop that will get stuck in our head, the fastest way to get home, or where to buy the cheapest tickets for our dream getaway.

The search engine has always been Yandex’s first love, but now we understand it more broadly: it is a universal assistant, a navigator for life. A search is a tip just when we need it, helpful advice, new opportunities.

All of our services are designed to improve and simplify the daily lives of our users. Each one helps us do something that seemed impossible before. Just a few years ago, no one ever thought they could watch a video in a foreign language and understand it completely. We took for granted that we would have to wait for a taxi outside or order one far ahead of time. Driverless cars were science fiction, and no one imagined that there would be generative neural networks and virtual assistants that they could entrust with their everyday lives. Now these things are all second nature.

We were there from the beginning, making services for people. Services that both have deep knowledge of the world and that understand the interests of our users. Services that change your environment and help achieve your goals.

User happiness is our goal: positivity and ease of use mean more to us than monetization. We figure, if we make something that people like, monetization will take care of itself. In any case, your interests always come first.
Our work is based on technological approaches and statistically verifying any substantive change. All updates have to be thoroughly justified and proven useful.

Yandex is a technology company. Our services are based on complex, unique, and difficult-to-reproduce technologies. This allows us to do things that would have seemed like magic just a short time ago.

Back in 2009, Yandex built its own machine learning method: Matrixnet. In 2011, we launched a machine translation service. At that time, it was only one of three in the world. Now, almost all of our services use artificial intelligence. Neural networks help us rank search results; predict the weather; select ads; identify spam; translate texts, images, and videos; and much, much more.

Yandex has been developing the YandexGPT and YandexART generative models since 2023. The YandexGPT neural network is designed to answer questions and compose, correct, improve, and shorten texts, as well as highlight the main points. The YandexART neural network generates images and animations based on a text request.

Thanks to Yandex speech technologies, Alice can understand your questions and tell you the answers. Our recommendation technologies help you choose from a variety of options: songs in Yandex Music, films on Kinopoisk, and products in Market and Lavka. Yandex’s Meteum makes a weather forecast accurate to a quarter-year, taking into account data from a large collection of sources: forecasts from global suppliers and information from radars, satellites, and professional and amateur weather stations, as well as signals from users.
In 2017, Yandex conducted its first tests of driverless vehicles, and now 120 of our autonomous cars are already driving on Russian roads. And don’t be surprised if your next meal or grocery order is brought to you by a perky little Yandex robot.

To keep all this running, Yandex maintains a huge network of data processing and storage centers with tens of thousands of servers. Yandex’s computing capabilities and algorithms are also used for scientific research. Like the neural network we created for geophysicists in Kamchatka that predicts the spread of volcanic ash, or the tech that helps employees at the Saylyugemsky National Park identify rare animals in camera trap images.

We have assembled a team of specialists in many fields of science, including mathematics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, programming, and linguistics, and they also take an active role in sharing their knowledge with the next generation.

Since 2007, the School of Data Analysis has been training university graduates and seniors the data processing and analysis and machine learning skills they will need in their careers, free of charge. These students will go on to work at Yandex and elsewhere, and we have other schools for developers, analysts, managers, etc. We also cooperate with the country’s leading universities, and in 2014, we joined with the Higher School of Economics to open a computer science department. We teach basic programming skills to students from schools, colleges, and vocational schools as part of the Yandex Lyceum educational project, and we prepare schoolchildren for mathematics and computer science olympiads for free. Yandex Praktikum lets people of different ages and with different levels of training acquire digital skills and master new specialties.

Every year, we organize large conferences on topics from cloud services to online advertising, and we regularly hold lectures, seminars, and master classes.

Like any major market player, Yandex has a great influence on the Internet, and it’s our responsibility to ensure that it’s a positive one. More than anything, we value the people that use our services, and to ensure they get what they’re looking for, we need an open, diverse Internet with high-quality resources.

The only way to develop services that are up to our standards is by cooperating with all market participants, taking into account their interests. We create solutions and develop transparent rules of interaction, and, as a result, our users benefit.

One of our main goals is to create platforms that any businesses can connect to, from grocery stores to taxi companies. We design revolutionary tools for consumers, no matter where they are or what they want.

The real history of Yandex began long before the company’s founding—back in the early 1990s. And when Yandex finally appeared in 2000—three years after the launch of yandex.ru—our team consisted of twenty-five people, and all of our data was stored on a single server. Now we have offices and representatives in several different countries, as well as over 28,000 employees. In Russia, Yandex’s search share is 66.4% (Yandex Radar, fourth quarter of 2024).

A significant portion of Yandex’s income comes from advertising sales, and ads can be run on desktop and mobile devices and targeted to a specific audience. We offer a comprehensive service for working with all types of advertising (Yandex Direct), as well as analytical tools for assessing the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

In 2002, Yandex became self-sufficient, and our revenue has been growing steadily ever since. In May 2011, Yandex listed its shares on NASDAQ, a stock exchange focused on tech companies. In July 2024, we announced the completion of our restructuring. Yandex’s new parent company is the Yandex International Public Joint-Stock Company, and its shares are traded on the Moscow Exchange as YDEX.