Yandex LLC (Russian: Яндекс, romanized: Yandeks, IPA: [ˈjandəks]) is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming media, online shopping, and a ridesharing company.

In 1990, Arkady Volozh contacted Ilya Segalovich (1964–2013), a friend of his from high school, to join his venture developing algorithms to search Russian texts.

[20] In 2007, Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users and in May 2007, it opened a development center in Kyiv.

In 2010, Yandex launched its "Poltava" search engine algorithm for Ukrainian users based on its MatrixNet technology.

[35] In December 2010, Yandex launched Yandex.Start to find startups and work with them systematically, and purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology.

[58][59][60] In November 2012, Yandex launched a mapping service for Europe and the U.S.[61] In March 2013, the company added an English language user interface to its translation mobile app to widen its international appeal.

[70][71] In March 2014, it acquired Israeli geolocation startup KitLocate and opened a research and development (R&D) office in Israel.

[85] In October 2017, the company introduced its intelligent personal assistant, Alisa (Alice), for Android, iOS, and Microsoft Windows.

[103] In November 2019, the company was forced by the Russian government to undergo a corporate restructure, giving more influence to pro-Kremlin board members.

[104] For the month of April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia, Yandex made its home COVID-19 testing service free of charge for all residents of certain areas.

[107] In August 2020, the company's offices in Minsk were raided by authorities to suppress protesters of the results of the 2020 Belarusian presidential election.

[109] In October 2020, Yandex held merger negotiations with Tinkoff Bank (now T-Bank) but the two sides failed to agree on terms.

[114] Also in August 2021, Yandex acquired Uber's stake in its self-driving car division and food delivery business in a $1 billion transaction.

The new plant will produce servers, data storage systems, gateways and smart equipment under "Openyard" brand.

[140] Between 2021 and 2023, Yandex introduced automatic voice-over translation for any YouTube video in English, Chinese, French, Spanish and German.

It was a unique patented algorithm for the building of machine learning models, which used one of the original gradient boosting schemes.

[154] At the time of release, the technology was already in use as part of a collaborative project with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to analyze the results of conducted particle experiments.

[163][164] In October and November 2018, Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the Regin malware, aimed at stealing technical information from its research and development unit on how users were authenticated.

In June 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the company no longer displayed any national borders on Yandex Maps.

[173] Maxim Akimov, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, said that the government would take action to relieve FSB pressure on the company.

[174] Alexander Zharov, head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, subsequently said that Yandex and the FSB had reached an agreement where the company would provide the required data without handing over the encryption keys.

[176] In late March 2022, Yandex was the subject of an investigation by Financial Times and Me2B Alliance, a nonprofit organization, as part of an application auditing campaign led by researcher Zach Edwards.

Edwards and four expert researchers, including Cher Scarlett, a former Apple security engineer, found that a software development kit (SDK) called AppMetrica, a product of Yandex, was harvesting data from more than 52,000 applications such as a user's device fingerprint and IP address and storing it in Russia on Yandex's servers, which they said due to Russian law, and the nature of SDKs, could be accessed by Russian authorities without their knowledge.

[179] In March 2022, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that Yandex-delivered ads promoted misinformation about the war in Ukraine.

[180] Many of the articles displayed in Yandex's news aggregators were also from Russian state-owned and state-sponsored sources and the top search results about the war would sometimes prominently feature pro-war websites.

[181] In March 2022, Tigran Khudaverdyan resigned as executive director and deputy CEO after being sanctioned by the European Union for "hiding information" from the Russian public through the manipulation of search results.

[182] According to an investigation by Meduza published on 5 May 2022, since 2016, the top-5 results on the Yandex home page only includes pro-Kremlin media approved by the Presidential Administration of Russia.

[183] In June 2023, Yandex was fined 2 million roubles by a Moscow court for its repeated refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.

[184][185] In July 2023, Kinopoisk, a subsidiary of the company, was fined 1 million rubles for "showing films demonstrating non-traditional sexual relations".

[186] In the first half of 2024, the company received 36,540 requests from the Russian government to disclose user data, a 12% increase from the prior year.