Last week Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian search giant and Google’s archrival on the Russian market, celebrated its 20th anniversary. Why is it so popular among Russians? Yandex is more than a company; it’s a matter of national pride. Russians like to wear clothing by major international and American brands, but when it comes to online services, they go local. In …
Today Yandex.Translate launched a hybrid machine translation system that combines neural and statistical approaches to machine translation to deliver our users an even higher quality translation that utilizes the complementary strengths of both translation models. The new system first translates users’ queries using both a statistical and a neural machine translation model. Next, CatBoost, our gradient …
Earlier this week Yandex, the Russian search giant, released a new search algorithm inspired by neural networks to better understand users’ intent and handle long-tail queries. The new algorithm is named after Korolyov, the lead Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer in the 1950s and 1960s. ‘Korolyov’ significantly improves upon its predecessor, ‘Palekh,’ the neural network-inspired algorithm …
Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian search company, has just announced Yandex.Radar, a new analytics tool that provides webmasters with accurate search engine and browser usage data available for the Internet market in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Yandex.Radar allows webmasters to quickly and easily segment search engine and browser usage data by device type and operating system. For example, …
Yandex releases Yandex.Radar, a new search traffic and browser usage analytics tool Read More
Now local businesses can display prices, opening hours, rankings and other details about their activity in Yandex Maps, the mapping tool of the Russian search giant. These features (which have been available only to Android users) will help users identify and compare appropriate cafés, hotels, or any other outlet listed on the maps. This is not …
Russia has come out on top of a ranking of government requests to have online content removed or blocked, according to Google’s latest Transparency Report. Last year, the Russian authorities filed more than 13,000 requests with the search engine to have online content on Google platforms removed, including on YouTube. Compared to 2015, the number of requests …
Most requests to remove online content come from Russia, Google says Read More
Yandex.Taxi, the taxi service of Russian Internet giant Yandex, and Uber have agreed to merge their businesses in Russia and neighboring countries Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Should it receive regulatory approvals the transaction is scheduled for completion in late 2017, stated Yandex. [Update: the merger was cleared in Nov. 2017] “This deal is a testament …
Uber and Yandex.taxi announce plans to merge in Eastern Europe into a $3.7 billion company Read More
Russia’s telecom regulator Roskomnadzor blocked internet giant Google for several hours on Thursday in a bid to enforce a tax ruling made in 2016. Google.ru appeared on Russia’s register of banned sites for approximately three hours on Thursday afternoon, with a number of internet providers restricting users’ access. The site was blocked as part of …
Arkady Volozh, the co-founder of Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian Internet giant, doesn’t like giving interviews to the media. However, he made an exception this week, following the recent settlement between Google and Russia’s Antimonopoly Service over a lawsuit brought by Yandex. Speaking to Anastasia Golitsyna, a correspondent for the business daily Vedomosti, Volozh answered questions …
Two weeks after the Ukrainian authorities banned leading Russian Internet sites as part of sanctions affecting 468 Russian legal entities, Yandex announced that the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) conducted searches at the company’s offices in Kiev and Odessa. Yandex.Ukraine management and employees are accused of having gathered personal data of Ukrainian users and transmitted them …
Yandex’s Ukrainian offices searched by security service Read More
Confirming that the relations between Ukraine and Russia are currently at their lowest, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko yesterday signed a decree applying sanctions to 468 legal entities and 1,228 individuals from Russia. Among the targeted organizations are the two leading Russian Internet groups — Yandex and Mail.Ru Group — the services of which will be made …
Russia’s largest internet group, NASDAQ-listed Yandex on Thursday raised its sales outlook for the year after settling a dispute with Google over product distribution on the U.S. company’s Android operating system. Google announced a deal with Yandex and Russia’s competition watchdog on April 17, pledging to stop requiring manufacturers of Android-based devices to pre-install its …
Yandex raises revenue forecast, talks up dividend prospect Read More
