Not just that. Russia is going to confiscate all Western assets in Russia as a counter measure. Valued roughly at 200B USD, mainly owned by EU countries.
Yandex would lose their Russian business in any case.
This is Yandex's European arm divesting itself from the Search+Mail business they have in Russia.
In the press release, this was even mentioned - that Yandex's Russian management (aka most of it's management) would be buying out their Russian operations.
I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia, so unfortunately these "Western assets" need to be written off anyway. A large part of them ($98bn) came from Cyprus which might just be round-tripping Russian money.
Yandex will survive, it is a company that was founded and to this day consists of good values and good people, much has been written about this by independent journalists [1] [2] and by the people at the company [3]
The only time I ever saw a car without a driver was on a visit to Israel.
On the highway to Tel Aviv (intercity - not a side road), there was a car with Yandex Auto Drive (in Hebrew) plastered all over it, driving in the lane next to ours. We had plenty of time to look - there was no driver at all, or they were sitting so low they would not have been able to see the road.
Made me realize that some companies fly under the radar and then seem to show up out of nowhere. I never thought of Yandex as anything but search till that moment.
They also own largest Taxi service in Russia (Yandex Taxi), largest food and home goods delivery service (Yandex Lavka), and largest car sharing service (Yandex Drive). Yandex Taxi has been testing self-driving cars in Moscow for years.
Interesting to note is that all of these lines of business were created as in-house startups, not through acquisitions. In the local business community they are famous for doing the internal sandboxing and investing just right.
However, Yandex has mixed results outside of the Russian market, as far as I'm aware. E.g. former two services are driven locally by extremely low wage workforce from ex-Soviet countries, I'd guess their business model has this ingrained, and just does not work the same in markets with more expensive labor.
Any large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state - even if the relationship is informal. Particularly, if the company is related to mass media and surveillance. Yandex is a state-controlled company even if the legal structure doesn't indicate this.
I would interpret this divestment as Russian intention to use Yandex as a tool for doing foreign influence, similar to RT or their social networks manipulation. It should be sanctioned.
Yeah I can't imagine the Russian police state passing up on eavesdropping on all search and activity there, it's simply too valuable as an intelligence asset and there is nothing that any yandex employees residing in Russia could do about it without risking being imprisoned/disappeared
50% discount for Russian oil oligarchs. I guess they really think Russia will continue to cut ties with the rest of the world for a very long time and are cutting their losses now.
"We managed to move out the majority of our people from Russia."
Much respect to these guys for their principled stand.
Ok, I had let my CLion subscription lapse because I didn't like where they were going with the RustRover/CLion split (I do both C++ and Rust work, and would prefer one tool).
OP is describing it as an analogy of what the equivalent action by Alphabet would be and it’s pretty accurate - Yandex search remains in Moscow while the rest of Yandex operations (eg cloud) remains in the EU.
I feel sorry for Volozh, he managed to keep his business for longer than many others.
It is interesting that a part of the deal is paid in yuan, probably to avoid Western sanctions. This is the new reality in which Russian businesses do exist now and may be a sign of the fragmentation of the global financial system.
Also interesting is that while Volozh now resides in Israel, Yandex was very active in UAE recently with taxi, food and groceries delivery services. I doubt that anything will change because of the massacre in Gaza.
Around 20% of Israelis immigrated from the Soviet Union 20-30 years ago, and Russia and Ukraine still have fairly large Jewish communities.
Volozh is himself Russian Jewish, so it makes sense he decided to take up Israeli citizenship instead of keeping his Russian one. A lot of Ukrainian and Russian Jews did that right after 2022.
Dubai has a fairly large CIS diaspora (around 1.5-2% of the entire population) so it's unsurprising that Yandex is fairly popular there.
Russian services are decently popular in Israel for similar reasons as well.
If we look at the tech giants, almost none of them has retained the original founders at the helm, and I guess for the same reason that leading a huge corporation requires a very specific life style and compromises, than tech founders are used to.
I believe Arkady Volozh could continue to lead Yandex but he would have to turn into Herman Gref, in terms of loyalties, how he spends his time and the people who he will have to interact with. He choose not to, and that was perhaps a decade ago.
What happens in Gaza is both justified war and a massacre, because Israel does not fulfill its obligations under international law to protect Palestinian civilians.
More specifically Israel did not:
1. offer a refuge to Palestinian civilians with necessary infrastructure on the territory secured and controlled by its own military (i.e. on its own territory);
2. organize evacuation of people from war zone;
3. ensure safe passage for humanitarian aid in a sufficient volume;
4. start planning reconstruction and aid to help Palestinians building independent democratic state under the two-state solution.
I don’t want to start a long discussion on why this didn’t happen, just to state the fact that it did not and as a result numerous war crimes were committed, which could have altered the relationship with Arab states, but they didn’t. And that is a notable fact to me with regards to the specific person and company.
Israeli invasion killed alread > 1% of total population of Gaza, further 2-3% have been iniured.
According to you, did Israel get a blank check? Are they justified to do literally anything? Whst if the killed percentage will go to 5, 10 %. Still fine?
How do we access the Russian based search engine, and will it still serve English language results?
The European business will fall under the Digital Services Act and EU directed content moderation. I sometimes want to see results of independent and foreign sources which Yandex was previously good for providing.
Mail.ru will be owned by the Russian consortium as well. This divestment is to split their startups and a couple EU based assets from their Russian ones.
I wonder how will Yandex Mail work after this (or maybe currently?) in regards to data protection. I know there exists mail.yandex.com and mail.yandex.ru... is the former, or will it be, based in the Netherlands, meaning that access from western countries with a court order would be granted?
Yandex Mail is part of the Russian business that is getting divested based on the press release.
Yandex is basically splitting it's Russian assets (Search, Mail) from it's EU assets (a couple moonshots and a DC).
It looks more like a Russian company divesting from the EU than the other way around tbh.
"The Purchaser consortium, led by members of the senior management team of our Russian businesses"
"YNV will retain a portfolio of international businesses and other non-Russian assets, including four early-stage technology businesses and other assets:
- Nebius AI, an AI cloud platform that is one of the largest providers of GPU capacity in Europe;
- Toloka AI, a data solutions partner for GenAI and Large Language Model development;
- Avride, one of the leading developers of self-driving technologies;
- TripleTen, an EdTech service that equips people with in-demand tech skills;
- our data center located in Finland;
and
minority investments in other technology businesses."
I wonder how the Finnish data center is doing. At the start of the invasion, their electricity provider ended their contract and they were running the data centre on diesel alone.
This community's favorite thing is to complain about something that's ill defined. A post about BGP without saying it's the border gateway protocol will have its comments go off on a stupid tangent of if an HN reader should be expected to know what BGP is. (seriously people, go Google the term and don't demand everyone spoon-feed your intellectual midgetry!) Thus, an explanation that Yandex is Russian Google is to try and head off that derail. Of course, now we're having this discussion instead, so it seems like we can't win.
Even if I've heard the name Yandex before, it's a good reminder of what it is.
I don't think it's a good explanation. If I had no idea what Yandex is, the title would make me think it is a Google subsidiary to evade sanctions or something.
It’s the same as saying Naver (SK Google), or Weibo (Chinese Twitter), and so on. They’re primarily used by their local residents, and have little traction outside, despite having millions of active users. Giving a clarification makes it a bit more clear.
The Yandex brand is only directly used in the Russian market, I think? The company does also have popular products abroad like the discount taxi app Yango, but you need to connect the dots there. (I suppose they intentionally try to brand these products away from Yandex to reduce the impact of the Russian connection.)
Regional sites and apps in general aren’t that well known. How many people on HN are familiar with Kaspi, the “WeChat of Kazakhstan”? Apparently it’s immensely popular there and completely unknown elsewhere. Like Kazakhstan, Russia isn’t a significant market globally.
You're over-estimating how many people actually "surf" the net. I'd wager most of HN knows Yandex, but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex (aside from streaming, even then they probably aren't explicitly going to the yandex url). You would see the same case for a Chinese search engine.
People in general spend a remarkable amount of time visiting the same 3-4 websites over and over and some apps.
I don't think it's inappropriate to provide context to people that might not be across Yandex. HN is read by a large volume of people from diverse backgrounds -- not always CS and/or startups.
I would not be surprised if some subset of those people hadn't heard of Yandex.
Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. Not blaming the user for explaining, I just didn't understand why an explanation is needed on this site of all places. Like others have pointed out, Yandex isn't only used by Russians but around the world. They clearly have the best freely accessible reverse image search since Google has impaired theirs for whatever reason. But I guess I'm in a bit of a bubble assuming that everyone knows the company.
Their software counterpart seems nice. I have only had experienced with Yandex browser though, at the time I liked to try out different browser to find what work best.
Yandex was minimal looking on both mobile and desktop and had nice features such as its equivalent of Opera Turbo, automatically use of a separate container for banking apps etc. They also have a Russian dubbing feature for Youtube but I don't know how well it work or any risk of censoring, not speaking the language.
This is an impressive feature, considering that you can even watch videos from Chinese tech bloggers when there are no prepared English subtitles on YouTube. In other cases, it reads the already written subtitles, but analyzes the speech and divides it into different female/male voices. Some words can be translated funny in the wrong context.
I think you're asking the wrong question, at least for me.
If "Yandex" is selling all Russia-based businesses/assets and is itself "Russian Google" - what's left then.
For me this means I now kinda have to dig deeper and grasp wtf is actually going on, because to me Yandex was exactly that, a Russian search engine and nothing more (although I saw some people hint at more in the past, never looked it up).
Yandex is Russian Alphabet, not just Google: they have a successful mail/cloud product, maps, taxi, food and grocery delivery among many other things. Some of those products are successful abroad.
I have heard the name before, but only in topics regarding russia, e.g. news about the Moscow stock market or similar. I couldn't tell you what sort of products they have. I have never used one of their sites/products (at least knowingly). I always assumed it was a Russian tech company having 100% Russian users. Basically like vk(ontakte) is, or what Baidu is in China?
Despite HN guidelines "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" people are generally not curious about what is going on outside their country (+US).
I personally think it does matter, I use it often to find things that I can't find on Google. I was actually just thinking today how many thing I've been able to find using Yandex that I couldn't find using Google and that in some ways, I almost prefer it as a search engine lately.
"The consideration will be paid in a combination of: (i) a cash equivalent of at least RUB 230 billion"
This money will go to Russian economy and will indirectly support the war. Instead these money should have been frozen in an escrow account and potentially used to rebuild Ukrainian economy.
All Yandex's money is already in Russia, in Sberbank or smth. Good luck telling Sberbank to freeze it and send to Ukraine. In this deal, they are salvaging some money and taking it out of Russia.
Google image search went from good to dead in the past ~2 years, first they've hidden the features like search on image, or jump to image, then they completely removed them.
Following completion of the sale transaction, YNV will retain a portfolio of international businesses and other non-Russian assets, including four early-stage technology businesses and other assets:
* Nebius AI, an AI cloud platform that is one of the largest providers of GPU capacity in Europe;
* Toloka AI, a data solutions partner for GenAI and Large Language Model development;
* Avride, one of the leading developers of self-driving technologies;
* TripleTen, an EdTech service that equips people with in-demand tech skills;
* our data center located in Finland; and
* minority investments in other technology businesses.
From what I understand, this means basically that they are selling search and associated services that are mostly popular in Russia to some Russian consortium. Bringing Yandex under complete Russian control, without influence from western shareholders.
Those western shareholders (YNV) get a bunch of money and the above AI related subsidaries located outside of Russia.
Weird accounting tricks in Russia include "the new nobility" making you offers that you cannot refuse. This is a country in which the FSB (equivalent of the FBI) is running their own protection rackets, even on a small scale of a local shop. Property law works very differently over there, which is to say it doesn't quite exist.
Volozh could stay in Moscow and keep Yandex, though he was not acting CEO for some time.
But, he decided he prefers Israel (residing "behind the bump" in general sense). In modern political climate, you have to choose between having your pie and eating it.
The FT one (https://archive.ph/YiA3q) says almost nothing. The Bloomberg one (https://archive.ph/AsVYu) says "The Russian unit represented more than 95% of the Yandex Group’s consolidated revenues in the first nine months of 2023, and approximately 95% of its consolidated assets and employees." Not much left!
This is likely related to the US imposing secondary sanctions early this year.
Yandex would lose access to their US/EU bank accounts if they were still operating in Russia.
Not just that. Russia is going to confiscate all Western assets in Russia as a counter measure. Valued roughly at 200B USD, mainly owned by EU countries.
Yandex would lose their Russian business in any case.
Yandex is keeping their Russian business.
This is Yandex's European arm divesting itself from the Search+Mail business they have in Russia.
In the press release, this was even mentioned - that Yandex's Russian management (aka most of it's management) would be buying out their Russian operations.
43 replies →
I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia, so unfortunately these "Western assets" need to be written off anyway. A large part of them ($98bn) came from Cyprus which might just be round-tripping Russian money.
162 replies →
That is a threat if the West confiscates Russian assets that have been frozen, Russia will retaliate in kind. https://www.rt.com/russia/591905-russia-asset-seizure-warnin...
1 reply →
With that is goodbye to any chance of wider Europe investing in Russia for the next century.
I hope India takes notice because so far they seemed to have cared little about the blood on their hands.
4 replies →
Yandex will survive, it is a company that was founded and to this day consists of good values and good people, much has been written about this by independent journalists [1] [2] and by the people at the company [3]
[1] Book https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Яндекс_Воложа
[2] Book https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Яндекс.Книга
[3] https://yandex.ru/company/values
Given that almost all Yandex business is in Russia, an appropriate headline would be "Yandex gets rid of its European shareholders".
The only time I ever saw a car without a driver was on a visit to Israel.
On the highway to Tel Aviv (intercity - not a side road), there was a car with Yandex Auto Drive (in Hebrew) plastered all over it, driving in the lane next to ours. We had plenty of time to look - there was no driver at all, or they were sitting so low they would not have been able to see the road.
Made me realize that some companies fly under the radar and then seem to show up out of nowhere. I never thought of Yandex as anything but search till that moment.
They also own largest Taxi service in Russia (Yandex Taxi), largest food and home goods delivery service (Yandex Lavka), and largest car sharing service (Yandex Drive). Yandex Taxi has been testing self-driving cars in Moscow for years.
Interesting to note is that all of these lines of business were created as in-house startups, not through acquisitions. In the local business community they are famous for doing the internal sandboxing and investing just right.
However, Yandex has mixed results outside of the Russian market, as far as I'm aware. E.g. former two services are driven locally by extremely low wage workforce from ex-Soviet countries, I'd guess their business model has this ingrained, and just does not work the same in markets with more expensive labor.
Any large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state - even if the relationship is informal. Particularly, if the company is related to mass media and surveillance. Yandex is a state-controlled company even if the legal structure doesn't indicate this.
I would interpret this divestment as Russian intention to use Yandex as a tool for doing foreign influence, similar to RT or their social networks manipulation. It should be sanctioned.
> Any large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state
Not unlike other countries... Particularly the ones that boast freedom.
> > Any large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state
Meanwhile US congress is 100% captured by corporate interests, especially the arms industry.
Yeah I can't imagine the Russian police state passing up on eavesdropping on all search and activity there, it's simply too valuable as an intelligence asset and there is nothing that any yandex employees residing in Russia could do about it without risking being imprisoned/disappeared
We set a good example with our NSA data center in Utah siphoning off the data of all Americans.
50% discount for Russian oil oligarchs. I guess they really think Russia will continue to cut ties with the rest of the world for a very long time and are cutting their losses now.
50% discount is just the official rule. If they tried to acquire it on a real market, they would likely have to pay much more.
or there are penalties that they are about to start running into
Wonder what happened to Jetbrains. They have a CZ entity but the largest part of the workforce was in Russia.
All their Russian offices were closed, including sales and R&D activities.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...
"We managed to move out the majority of our people from Russia."
Much respect to these guys for their principled stand.
Ok, I had let my CLion subscription lapse because I didn't like where they were going with the RustRover/CLion split (I do both C++ and Rust work, and would prefer one tool).
But this may make me reconsider.
3 replies →
This perfectly shows that we need to be remote. They did not wanna all move to Czechia or any other single location.
More like Alphabet selling off its Google and downscaling two orders of magnitude.
Don't think it will get the cash, it probably has obligations for almost every cent, so this would be a virtual deal mostly.
It has nothing to do with google and alphabet. Apart from being a good search engine and a competitor within the same space.
OP is describing it as an analogy of what the equivalent action by Alphabet would be and it’s pretty accurate - Yandex search remains in Moscow while the rest of Yandex operations (eg cloud) remains in the EU.
3 replies →
I feel sorry for Volozh, he managed to keep his business for longer than many others.
It is interesting that a part of the deal is paid in yuan, probably to avoid Western sanctions. This is the new reality in which Russian businesses do exist now and may be a sign of the fragmentation of the global financial system.
Also interesting is that while Volozh now resides in Israel, Yandex was very active in UAE recently with taxi, food and groceries delivery services. I doubt that anything will change because of the massacre in Gaza.
> Also interesting is that while Volozh now resides in Israel, Yandex was very active in UAE
UAE is on friendly terms with Israel (at least for now). They have also been aggressively targeting US tech refugees (ie: telegram, binance).
That's not the reason.
Around 20% of Israelis immigrated from the Soviet Union 20-30 years ago, and Russia and Ukraine still have fairly large Jewish communities.
Volozh is himself Russian Jewish, so it makes sense he decided to take up Israeli citizenship instead of keeping his Russian one. A lot of Ukrainian and Russian Jews did that right after 2022.
Dubai has a fairly large CIS diaspora (around 1.5-2% of the entire population) so it's unsurprising that Yandex is fairly popular there.
Russian services are decently popular in Israel for similar reasons as well.
2 replies →
If we look at the tech giants, almost none of them has retained the original founders at the helm, and I guess for the same reason that leading a huge corporation requires a very specific life style and compromises, than tech founders are used to.
I believe Arkady Volozh could continue to lead Yandex but he would have to turn into Herman Gref, in terms of loyalties, how he spends his time and the people who he will have to interact with. He choose not to, and that was perhaps a decade ago.
Other than a billboard for a gps routing service I haven’t seen anything resembling Yandex here in Dubai.
They use different branding outside of Russia: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ride-hailing-app-yango-se...
The massacre was in Israel, when Hamas mass raped and murdered Israelis.
What happens in Gaza is a justified war to prevent such attacks from occuring again.
What happens in Gaza is both justified war and a massacre, because Israel does not fulfill its obligations under international law to protect Palestinian civilians.
More specifically Israel did not:
1. offer a refuge to Palestinian civilians with necessary infrastructure on the territory secured and controlled by its own military (i.e. on its own territory);
2. organize evacuation of people from war zone;
3. ensure safe passage for humanitarian aid in a sufficient volume;
4. start planning reconstruction and aid to help Palestinians building independent democratic state under the two-state solution.
I don’t want to start a long discussion on why this didn’t happen, just to state the fact that it did not and as a result numerous war crimes were committed, which could have altered the relationship with Arab states, but they didn’t. And that is a notable fact to me with regards to the specific person and company.
Israeli invasion killed alread > 1% of total population of Gaza, further 2-3% have been iniured.
According to you, did Israel get a blank check? Are they justified to do literally anything? Whst if the killed percentage will go to 5, 10 %. Still fine?
7 replies →
Actual content: https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024
How do we access the Russian based search engine, and will it still serve English language results?
The European business will fall under the Digital Services Act and EU directed content moderation. I sometimes want to see results of independent and foreign sources which Yandex was previously good for providing.
Good, I use yandex mail and search and I would mind if it died.
Mail is a no nonsense mail provider, and works everywhere my own tld address is rejected by stupid forms.
And yandex censorship is different than google censorship, so the venn diagam of what you can find with both is pretty good.
> yandex censorship is different than google censorship
That's exactly it
We shouldn't have so few search providers in any case
Mail.ru will be owned by the Russian consortium as well. This divestment is to split their startups and a couple EU based assets from their Russian ones.
[flagged]
I wonder how will Yandex Mail work after this (or maybe currently?) in regards to data protection. I know there exists mail.yandex.com and mail.yandex.ru... is the former, or will it be, based in the Netherlands, meaning that access from western countries with a court order would be granted?
Yandex Mail is part of the Russian business that is getting divested based on the press release.
Yandex is basically splitting it's Russian assets (Search, Mail) from it's EU assets (a couple moonshots and a DC).
It looks more like a Russian company divesting from the EU than the other way around tbh.
"The Purchaser consortium, led by members of the senior management team of our Russian businesses"
"YNV will retain a portfolio of international businesses and other non-Russian assets, including four early-stage technology businesses and other assets:
- Nebius AI, an AI cloud platform that is one of the largest providers of GPU capacity in Europe;
- Toloka AI, a data solutions partner for GenAI and Large Language Model development;
- Avride, one of the leading developers of self-driving technologies;
- TripleTen, an EdTech service that equips people with in-demand tech skills;
- our data center located in Finland;
and minority investments in other technology businesses."
[0]
[0] - https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024
I wonder how the Finnish data center is doing. At the start of the invasion, their electricity provider ended their contract and they were running the data centre on diesel alone.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/05/yandex_datacenter_in_...
>(Russian Google)
Are there people here who don't know Yandex? Genuinely curious, if you didn't know what it is I'd like to hear from you.
This community's favorite thing is to complain about something that's ill defined. A post about BGP without saying it's the border gateway protocol will have its comments go off on a stupid tangent of if an HN reader should be expected to know what BGP is. (seriously people, go Google the term and don't demand everyone spoon-feed your intellectual midgetry!) Thus, an explanation that Yandex is Russian Google is to try and head off that derail. Of course, now we're having this discussion instead, so it seems like we can't win.
Even if I've heard the name Yandex before, it's a good reminder of what it is.
I don't think it's a good explanation. If I had no idea what Yandex is, the title would make me think it is a Google subsidiary to evade sanctions or something.
3 replies →
Nevermind. I was wrong. Asking someone to write out an acronym is too much.
5 replies →
It’s the same as saying Naver (SK Google), or Weibo (Chinese Twitter), and so on. They’re primarily used by their local residents, and have little traction outside, despite having millions of active users. Giving a clarification makes it a bit more clear.
The Yandex brand is only directly used in the Russian market, I think? The company does also have popular products abroad like the discount taxi app Yango, but you need to connect the dots there. (I suppose they intentionally try to brand these products away from Yandex to reduce the impact of the Russian connection.)
Regional sites and apps in general aren’t that well known. How many people on HN are familiar with Kaspi, the “WeChat of Kazakhstan”? Apparently it’s immensely popular there and completely unknown elsewhere. Like Kazakhstan, Russia isn’t a significant market globally.
"Yandex" is used everywhere AFAIK. I (in NZ) have used their search-by-image, which sometimes finds things no other image search seems to be able to.
2 replies →
I use Yandex on a weekly basis because its reverse image search is much better Google and Bing.
You're over-estimating how many people actually "surf" the net. I'd wager most of HN knows Yandex, but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex (aside from streaming, even then they probably aren't explicitly going to the yandex url). You would see the same case for a Chinese search engine.
People in general spend a remarkable amount of time visiting the same 3-4 websites over and over and some apps.
>but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex
They have the most popular reverse image search tool now that Google got rid of theirs
5 replies →
I don't think it's inappropriate to provide context to people that might not be across Yandex. HN is read by a large volume of people from diverse backgrounds -- not always CS and/or startups.
I would not be surprised if some subset of those people hadn't heard of Yandex.
I know it but only because they didn't require phone confirmation for email accounts so it was great for sockpuppets.
I've asked around here to my colleagues and none of them have ever heard of it. One of them asked if it's the same as baidu :)
Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. Not blaming the user for explaining, I just didn't understand why an explanation is needed on this site of all places. Like others have pointed out, Yandex isn't only used by Russians but around the world. They clearly have the best freely accessible reverse image search since Google has impaired theirs for whatever reason. But I guess I'm in a bit of a bubble assuming that everyone knows the company.
Requiring phone numbers for things is why I don't sign up.
To me, the name Yandex seemed familiar, but I did not know what it was until now.
I know what it is, but IIRC haven't used it, even a single time.
But I don't think most people around here (Central Europe) heard about it. It's kinda like Baidu in that regard.
Their software counterpart seems nice. I have only had experienced with Yandex browser though, at the time I liked to try out different browser to find what work best.
Yandex was minimal looking on both mobile and desktop and had nice features such as its equivalent of Opera Turbo, automatically use of a separate container for banking apps etc. They also have a Russian dubbing feature for Youtube but I don't know how well it work or any risk of censoring, not speaking the language.
This is an impressive feature, considering that you can even watch videos from Chinese tech bloggers when there are no prepared English subtitles on YouTube. In other cases, it reads the already written subtitles, but analyzes the speech and divides it into different female/male voices. Some words can be translated funny in the wrong context.
I think you're asking the wrong question, at least for me.
If "Yandex" is selling all Russia-based businesses/assets and is itself "Russian Google" - what's left then.
For me this means I now kinda have to dig deeper and grasp wtf is actually going on, because to me Yandex was exactly that, a Russian search engine and nothing more (although I saw some people hint at more in the past, never looked it up).
Yandex is Russian Alphabet, not just Google: they have a successful mail/cloud product, maps, taxi, food and grocery delivery among many other things. Some of those products are successful abroad.
I have heard the name before, but only in topics regarding russia, e.g. news about the Moscow stock market or similar. I couldn't tell you what sort of products they have. I have never used one of their sites/products (at least knowingly). I always assumed it was a Russian tech company having 100% Russian users. Basically like vk(ontakte) is, or what Baidu is in China?
I’m more curious what you’re going to do to anyone who reports to you for the crime of not knowing what Yandex is
I've heard of Yandex but never used it.
Actually I have a question: what are they salvaging this way, considering the comments say all their operations and people are physically in Russia?
I didn't hear about yandex until last year, and it was probably from this website, and only as an option for duckduckgo to use use for image search.
Despite HN guidelines "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" people are generally not curious about what is going on outside their country (+US).
This is 100% incorrect.
Where are they from now? Not that it matters much.
Wiki says they're incorporated in Netherlands.
<ironic> Finally Europe has a European Google! </ironic>
2 replies →
Probably just to avoid paying taxes (the famous "dutch sandwich" trick)
I personally think it does matter, I use it often to find things that I can't find on Google. I was actually just thinking today how many thing I've been able to find using Yandex that I couldn't find using Google and that in some ways, I almost prefer it as a search engine lately.
https://archive.is/Gghfq
"The consideration will be paid in a combination of: (i) a cash equivalent of at least RUB 230 billion"
This money will go to Russian economy and will indirectly support the war. Instead these money should have been frozen in an escrow account and potentially used to rebuild Ukrainian economy.
All Yandex's money is already in Russia, in Sberbank or smth. Good luck telling Sberbank to freeze it and send to Ukraine. In this deal, they are salvaging some money and taking it out of Russia.
Just don't fuck up the image search. That's the best tool out there, but in the last few months, it got worse :(.
Google image search went from good to dead in the past ~2 years, first they've hidden the features like search on image, or jump to image, then they completely removed them.
Find source now works quite ok with gimg.
Huh? What are their other businesses then? Is this some weird accounting trick?
The article mentions them:
From what I understand, this means basically that they are selling search and associated services that are mostly popular in Russia to some Russian consortium. Bringing Yandex under complete Russian control, without influence from western shareholders.
Those western shareholders (YNV) get a bunch of money and the above AI related subsidaries located outside of Russia.
Weird accounting tricks in Russia include "the new nobility" making you offers that you cannot refuse. This is a country in which the FSB (equivalent of the FBI) is running their own protection rackets, even on a small scale of a local shop. Property law works very differently over there, which is to say it doesn't quite exist.
You can refuse, but then your chance of dying by "falling off the balcony" goes up dramatically.
2 replies →
Volozh could stay in Moscow and keep Yandex, though he was not acting CEO for some time.
But, he decided he prefers Israel (residing "behind the bump" in general sense). In modern political climate, you have to choose between having your pie and eating it.
2 replies →
[flagged]
13 replies →
Yeah, it's some complex deal, which is hard to make sense of. Here's a Bloomberg story:
>Yandex Parent Cuts Ties to Russia in $5.2 Billion Unit Sale
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-05/yandex-pa...
And here's FT:
>Search engine Yandex to sell Russian operations for $5bn
https://www.ft.com/content/1f965442-e3f9-46dc-ae4d-ef2e05740...
The FT one (https://archive.ph/YiA3q) says almost nothing. The Bloomberg one (https://archive.ph/AsVYu) says "The Russian unit represented more than 95% of the Yandex Group’s consolidated revenues in the first nine months of 2023, and approximately 95% of its consolidated assets and employees." Not much left!
Dang: please edit the link to the actual press, https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024, not the index page for the year 2024.
That was the submitted URL but our software replaced that with the canonical URL listed by the page (https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024). Reversed now. Thanks!
This does nothing, if you want dang to help, use the email address in the bottom Contact footer.
I'm not 100% sure if behind the scenes he has some sort of @dang webhook alert/filter or if he skims comments regularly
1 reply →
Thanks for pointing that out, my mistake. Unfortunately, I can only edit the title, not the link
Not your mistake! see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39267031.
[dead]