We spoke to Ilya Segalovich, CTO of Russian search engine Yandex, about the company’s plans to defeat competition from Google on its own doorstep and making its way to the rest of the world in its own special way.
Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia and was founded in 1997 by Segalovich along with Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky.
The search engine has in excess of 60pc of the entire search market in Russia and is the fifth-largest search engine worldwide.
The site performs 150m searches per day and has an average of 25m visitors a day.
The name Yandex is short for “Yet Another Index.”
Segalovich told us about his approach to innovation, which he said happens at a company-wide level as opposed to separating R&D into one area and revealed that Yandex’s march west is beginning tentatively in Turkey.
The key, he said, is building services that boost users’ online lives, such as browsers and desktop software, but at the same time are revenue positive for the company.
