Short answers, pulled from the story.
Yandex was founded by Arkady Volozh, who recruited his high school friend Ilya Segalovich in 1990 to develop search algorithms for Russian texts. The Yandex.ru search engine was launched on the 23rd of September 1997 and publicly presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow.
Yandex is an acronym for "Yet Another iNDEXer," coined in 1993. It is also a bilingual pun: the Cyrillic letter "Я" ("ya") means "I" in Russian, giving the name a double meaning as a personal index.
Yandex Search holds an estimated 72 percent market share in Russia, making it the largest search engine in the country. Its global market share is approximately 2.8 percent.
International sanctions imposed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, combined with restrictions on foreign ownership, led Nebius Group, the Dutch holding company that owned Yandex, to sell its Russian assets in July 2024. The assets were sold to a group of Russian investors for a discounted price of $5.3 billion.
CatBoost is an open-source machine learning library released by Yandex in July 2017. It implements the MatrixNet algorithm, which Yandex developed internally starting in 2009. The technology is used by JetBrains for code completion, CloudFlare for bot detection, and Careem for trip-distance calculations, and was applied in a collaboration with CERN to analyze particle physics experiments.
Yandex has faced repeated demands from Russia's Federal Security Service for user data and encryption keys, a 2019 corporate restructure that gave pro-Kremlin board members more influence, and a 2023 court fine of 2 million roubles for refusing to share user information with the FSB. In the first half of 2024, Russian authorities sent 36,540 data requests to the company, a 12 percent increase over the prior year.