Just as we discussed about the LinkedIn IPO, another piece of news hits the shelves of Internet. Yandex, Russia’s largest search enngine (and often compared to Google), entered the NASDAQ market. Yandex is not the first but still an important player on the latest string of internet companies listed in the US. The price of Yandex’s shares has increased with 50% in the first day of trading., which is good news. However, the signals of the stock markets are mixed: for example RenRen, the Chinese Facebook, now trades for less than the issue price, which means that some speculative activity was at play during the initial listing.
Yandex is not quite a child company. In March 2011, the yandex.ru website attracted 38.3 million unique visitors. It also has a 64% market share of all the Russia searches, which is quite impressive. However, the share is declining, as Google and Yahoo are bidding aggressively to enter that market.
The Yandex technology is a bit older than its competitors and dates from 1989-1990, when Yandex technology was first developed in partnership with the language experts from the Academy of Sciences as
a search system for the government of the Soviet Union. Since then, it has aggressively expanded to become one of the largest search engines in the world, with an algorithm quite different from its US counterparts.