Yandex

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Yandex

Basic information
Founded	1997
Legal structure	Private
Industry	Technology, Internet based services
Official website	https://yandex.com/

Yandex is a Russian technology conglomerate that provides internet-related services such as Yandex Search, Yandex Taxi and Yandex Maps It was founded in 1997 by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich as a search engine and over the years developed to become the number one used search engine in the Russian Federation and started having subsidiary companies in many different industries including: cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming media, online shopping, a ridesharing company, Music, and not so long ago started making it's own electronic devices

Consumer impact summary

User Freedom

The user can freely create an account and delete it, but when the user tries to delete an account, it tries to keep them from deleting it by asking questions like why they wish to delete their profile.

User Privacy

As of 19 May 2022, the Yandex privacy policy states that they will collect: Your name, mobile phone number, address and age; http headers, IP address, cookies, web beacons/pixel tags, browser information, information about your hardware and software, wi-fi network data; date and time of accessing the sites or services; your search history, data on purchases in the services, data on visited organizations, likes and preferences, email addresses of your email contacts, phonebook data, information about interactions with other users, as well as files and content stored in Yandex systems; (geo)location information; and payment card information.

Business Model

The business model of Yandex is maintaining its customer relationships through continuous innovation, customer support services, and personalized user experiences. Also Yandex is investing in it's own AI.

Market Control

Yandex is the leading search engine in the Russian Federation, and is actively trying to get even more subsidiary companies to control more of the Russian market.

Incidents

Contoversy	Year	Background Info	Aftermath	Related Article	Related Video (s)
Yandex being bundled with sketchy software, and paying bootleg Windows copy makers to include their browser as the default application upon install.	unknown - present		No consequences	PUP.Optional.Yandex	Как я обхитрил Яндекс и всех сборщиков Windows
Yandex makes all searches about Navalny give only negative results	27 April 2020 - 28 April 2020	Navalny was the main oppositioner of the Russian Goverment. They tried to paint him in a bad light through the search results.	Yandex had to back down and say it was a "timed experiment".	«Яндекс» всеми своими сервисами рисует образ Навального
Yandex was accused of advertising potentially unsafe results, including fake versions of well-known programs and websites.	3 September 2024	Yandex has promoted fake results for Skype, Anydesk, and other software, that was bundled with malware.	Yandex was taken to court, and was forced to pay ₽10,000 (~$125)	«Яндекс» наказали за рекламу контрафакта Яндекс помогает распространять вредоносное ПО?
Yandex collects data about users' locations, travel speeds, and names of the Wi-Fi networks they connect to. Also, Yandex profiles users based on their search queries using Yandex "Alice".	January 2023	In January 2023, Yandex had a massive source code leak, containing around 45 gigabytes of data.	In a press release about the data breach, Yandex said that user data was not affected, and apologized for its opaque recommendation system and "racial slurs" in some parts of its code.	Leaked Yandex Code Breaks Open the Creepy Black Box of Online Advertising Yandex comments on cybersecurity incident
Yandex was spying on its Android users using Yandex Metrica	June 2025	Yandex Metrica was sending unique identificators of it's users since 2017, from browsers into Yandex apps, which let them to link the websites the user visited to a specific user account in the Yandex ecosystem.	After the incident was known, google started an investigation, which made yandex to stop collecting data.	Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers

Products

Yandex Search - 23 sept 1997 - present

Used to censor searches to favor a political party and promote sketchy software

Yandex Metrica - 2008 - present

Used to steal data from Android users

Yandex Alice - 10 oct 2017 - present

Used to profile users to sell them more personalised things.

See also

• Google
• Bing
• DuckDuckGo