Yandex

Yandex is one of the largest internet companies in Europe, operating Russia’s most popular search engine and one of its most visited websites. We generated almost 60% of Russia’s search traffic in Q4 2014 (LiveInternet), while our sites attracted over 62 million unique visitors in December 2014 (TNS). Yandex creates services for people, with both a deep understanding of their interests and profound knowledge of their reality. All of our products and services are created with the mission to make people’s lives easier and better and provide them with the tools to discover new possibilities in their lives. Practically all of Yandex’s services use machine learning – including in the ranking of search results, serving online advertisements, and performing translations. In 2009 we developed and implemented our own machine learning method – MatrixNet. Thanks to our speech recognition technology, users can communicate verbally with the Yandex.Navigator street navigation app instead of typing in addresses manually. The users of our Yandex.Mail service can quickly find tickets, appointment notifications or information about discounts in their email accounts – all automatically marked by our fact extraction technology. We use our own computer vision methods to find similar images. In 2011, we launched a service for statistical machine translation – one of only three of this kind that currently exist in the world. Our technologies and services run on tens of thousands of servers. We have Russia’s largest network for data storage and processing. We share our data processing capacities with our partners working in, among other things, nuclear research and geological exploration. Yandex Data Factory, our recently launched research and development unit, is successfully implementing cutting-edge, custom-made big data solutions for businesses and organisations across a wide range of industries, from oil and gas, airspace and banking to retail and healthcare.