What is Yandex?
Yandex is a Russian multinational IT company that operates the largest search engine in Russia, yandex.ru.
Yandex search
The Yandex search engine was launched in the fall of 1997 and quickly became the leading search engine in Russia and the former Soviet Union countries. With nearly 60% market share, it even surpasses Google’s market share (20%) in this region.
The main difference between Yandex and Google is that Yandex places a greater emphasis on handling inflected forms of words due to the strong inflection system of the Russian language. In Yandex, searches with or without inflections return the same results.
Yandex offers more or less the same features as Google, including voice search, maps, and auto-completion, and its homepage is quite similar.
Yandex analytics
Yandex is not only a search engine but also tracks the traffic of major Russian websites, similar to Google Analytics. Unfortunately, the data collected by Yandex’s traffic monitoring and analytics tools is shared with Russian intelligence services, so one should think carefully before deciding to use it.