26_Yandex

Its name derives from the phrase “yet another indexer,” but the web-search firm Yandex is much more. One of the few search engines to fend off Google, Yandex holds a 65% share of Russian search. It ousted Google as Firefox’s default search engine in Russia and launched an English-language service last May, winning praise for its results’ neatness. (The complexity of Russian, with its Lego set of prefixes and roots, forces Yandex to create more nuanced algorithms.) It’s growing Google-style too, recently unveiling portrait search to find the face you seek in a photo, real-time traffic maps of Russian cities, and predictive search that “reads users’ minds,” says spokesman Alexander Amzin. Just a bit more evidence that Yandex is more than yet another indexer.