Yandex LLC () is a Russian multinational technology company providing Internet-related products and services, including an Internet search engine, information services, e-commerce, transportation, maps and navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising. It primarily serves audiences in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States of the former Soviet Union, and has more than 30 offices worldwide. The firm is the largest technology company in Russia and the second largest search engine on the Internet in Russian, with a market share of over 42%. It also has the largest market share of any search engine from Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States and is the 5th largest search engine worldwide after Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Baidu. Its main competitors on the Russian market are Google, VK, and Rambler. Yandex LLC's holding company, Yandex N.V., is registered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands as a naamloze vennootschap (Dutch public limited company), has its registered office in Schiphol Airport, and is listed in Nasdaq with a secondary listing in the Moscow Exchange. Offices Yandex has offices in 12 countries. The company's technology and business development unit, Yandex Labs, was opened in Silicon Valley in 2008. The Istanbul office was launched together with the company's web portal in Turkey in 2011. The company opened its first European office in Lucerne in 2012 to serve advertising clients in the EU. Its first research and development office in Europe started operating in Berlin in 2014. The company's Shanghai office was launched in 2015 to facilitate work with Chinese companies operating on the Russian language market. A new location in Prague was added in December 2021 to accommodate the company's rapidly expanding crowdsourcing, routing, cloud computing, ridesharing and weather forecasting teams. History Name In 1993, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, friends since their school days and by then working together to develop search software, invented the word "Yandex" to describe their search technologies. The name initially stood for "Yet Another iNDEXer". However, this is also a bilingual pun on "index" since "Я" ("ya") means "I" in Russian. Another pun is based on the yin and yang contrast (Russian: инь – индекс, ян – яндекс). Development Between 1993 and 1996, the company continued developing its search technologies and released software for searching the Bible. The Yandex.ru search engine was launched on September 23, 1997, and was presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. Initially, the search engine was developed by