Yandex Principles

We develop services that bring actual benefits and new opportunities to people—services that we’d like to use ourselves, and recommend to friends and family. We don’t just create things for the sake of making money.

We strive to develop services objectively, shaping them around the most complete and accurate understanding of the existing reality we can gain. To achieve this, we aggregate and analyze a range of data, including web pages and user reviews.

Our work is rooted in the values of honesty and transparency. We take it for granted that any internal dialogue, document, or source code could at some point become public knowledge. And if this happens, we’ll never be embarrassed.

Our most important customer is the user—those we work and develop services for. This includes not only people who turn to Yandex for completing everyday tasks, but also our various partners—shops, restaurants, couriers, drivers, content creators, and others. All of these are our users.

We are aware of the responsibilities that come with developing services that millions of people use, so endeavor to maximize utility and minimize annoyances. For instance, we invest heavily in proofing our services against spam, fraud, and other such irritations.

We develop services that are respectful of the local features of a given market, such as legislation, culture, and language.We call this the translocality principle.

Technology is our core competence. This means that when we develop services, we give a lot of thought to how technology can bring about additional value.

We’re not afraid to own up to our mistakes and discontinue services. It’s more important for us to be creating original, inventive products than never getting things wrong.

In whatever we do, we try not to take ourselves too seriously. We appreciate self-deprecating humor and love to laugh, especially at ourselves.

We do all we can to ensure that our services keep running and are useful to people in the long term. With this in mind, we try to create profitable services—after all, this means that they are in demand.

We also develop some services that’ll never be profitable, yet are still worth pursuing as they bring value and benefit to users.

Yandex develops business solutions that can be employed by a wide range of companies, as opposed to tailoring services to individual organizations.

We never cheat users or try to make money through cheating.

We don’t develop services aimed at making money through sweepstakes or casinos. Nor do we advertise casinos, sweepstakes, pyramids, or other zero- or negative-sum activities.

We place ads for social and charitable causes in accordance with special rules we’ve developed with experts, and which differ from our commercial advertising. To ensure these processes are transparent for both users and advertisers alike, we’ve published these rules. Additionally, we release reports about our social advertising, where we share the details of each campaign. Social ads are marked with a special symbol.

We only use data on user behavior for developing new services or improving existing ones that benefit the user. We absolutely never sell user data.

We’re fully aware of the attendant responsibility in storing large quantities of data on our users, such as search subjects. As a result, the security of our user’s data is one of our primary concerns—we handle and protect such data very carefully.

If we’re required to disclose data at the request of law enforcement agencies, we do so in strict accordance with the law and only to the extent that is necessary. We only ever consider requests from government agencies that come through official communication channels and meet all formal criteria. On a separate page of our official site, we publish data on the number of such requests as well as biannual reports.

While Yandex employees may have different political and religious views and positions, the products of our activities—that is, Yandex services—are totally devoid of political stance or connotation, and are equally suitable for all. We don’t create services that could potentially cause social divisions on political, racial, religious, or other issues.

Yandex is open to dialogue with both society and the state. The balance of being socially aware and meeting public demand while remaining compliant with the law is a necessary condition for the company’s development.

We comply with the law in our various countries of operation, and are also aware of our role in the development of the markets we’re part of. We’re actively involved in the constructive development of legislation around the impact of new technologies on society.

We provide government agencies with the same services we offer the rest of the market. Furthermore, we interact with them according to the same principles and terms (including price) as we do with commercial customers. We don’t change products by order of the state, nor do we develop services especially for the government.

We don’t develop military technology.

Since it’s impossible to make a clear distinction between personal and company position on social networks and other modern communication platforms, company executives don’t comment publicly on political topics. These restrictions don’t extend to the rest of the staff when expressing their opinions in personal statements and not on behalf of the company.

In emergencies, we provide services helping people access the information they need to ensure their own safety.

МWe’re in favor of competition and promote equal conditions for all companies. We don’t want our competitors to be deprived of any of their rights. We want to win in a competition that’s totally fair. This position is predicated on the principle that terms and conditions of operation should apply equally to all companies on the market, Yandex included.

We support competition between multinational and national companies, and are therefore opposed to internet fragmentation, which we avoid contributing to. Competition with global players helps to make us stronger, and develop the market as a whole.

When we hire employees from competing companies, we do so for the sole purpose of gaining a qualified professional, not for competition intelligence. We respect the NDAs of others as much as our own.

We don’t publicly criticize competitors or their products. We can only take responsibility for our own services, so they are exclusively the ones we discuss.

Any legal business can advertise through us in accordance with our general offer. At the same time, we believe it’s only fair that platforms that advertise through us allow us to advertise through them in turn.

We accept that competing online services are just a click away, so if the user doesn’t like something about one, they’re perfectly entitled to switch to another. We don’t in any way restrict the right of the user to switch to or receive information about a competing service. As a case in point, rival search engines have appeared in Yandex search results for twenty years.

Our search result ranking is based on utility—the degree to which a result will resolve the user’s query alongside other request factors. Yandex services are also ranked on the same principle.

We firmly believe that the user has the right by default to independently decide which services they use, and we oppose market practices that restrict this.

We strive to create AI algorithms that approach tasks in the way we would ourselves. Since artificial intelligence systems learn from the material people feed into them, we’re highly selective in the samples we use to train our models.

Security is a paramount concern in our AI development. All conclusions and predictions made by our algorithms must be reproducible. Our trained models are all tested in the laboratory prior to launch, and we carefully monitor all the conclusions that our algorithms reach.

Ranking should always be carried out in accordance with an algorithm, whose principles can be clearly and transparently shared with the public. This is especially true for top results and ratings.

Before an application is installed, we explicitly tell the user what they are installing. We don’t hide this information behind the click of a button or in the small print. If a license agreement must be accepted to install an application, the option to read the document must be given.

We don’t install one program or application as part of another, unbeknownst to the user. Nor do we create desktop shortcuts without the user’s approval to do so. We did this once, after which we were upset with ourselves. So we promptly mended the situation and added this item to our principles.

Before we add any new feature to a given application, we collect as much objective data as we can to verify its utility.

We believe that trust is the fundamental principle of creative freedom. We go by the assumption that every Yandex employee is a professional who needn’t be controlled or monitored. We let each employee take responsibility for their decisions and actions in exchange for seeing transparent goals, work, and results.

Yandex’s culture is egalitarian. We encourage people to express their professional opinion irrespective of their position. It’s standard practice to negotiate and explain, but not to give orders.

We value honesty and don’t deceive each other.

At Yandex, careers are built solely on professionalism, ability, and results. Connections and previous job titles make zero difference when we’re deciding who to hire or promote.

We all respect each other irrespective of age, gender, sexuality, religion, and views.

In believing that education is one of the most effective ways to create a better world, we develop educational programs in Maths and IT for people of various ages and backgrounds. We train IT specialists for everyone, not just ourselves.

We endeavor to build services that are accessible for all users, including those with disabilities. Our technologies help users overcome challenges, in both the digital environment and beyond it.

As proponents of systemic charity, we implement mechanisms in our services allowing users to donate to non-profits in the process of their day-to-day lives.

We take responsibility for the company’s environmental impact by prioritizing energy-saving solutions and striving to use less packaging and recyclable materials.