History of Yandex

A portal opened for Belarus, with all services orientated to the local audience, and with search taking the morphology of the Belarusian language into account. In the same year, Yandex opened a Partner Service Centre in Belarus, so that Belarusian sites could participate in the Yandex Advertising Network and receive payment in the national currency.

The company got its own antivirus technology. Based on behavioural analysis, it allowed the detection of sites with viruses that were not yet on antivirus databases. The company uses this technology to warn search users about dangerous sites. Later this technology was applied in other Yandex products, and the Safe Browsing API was released for outside developers.

A program for working with startups was launched — Yandex.Start. The company began looking for talented young people with interesting ideas, helping them stand on their own two feet. A few years later, a workshop for startups, Tolstoy Startup Camp, was launched within the Yandex.Start program, running several times a year.

This was also the year when Yandex first held Yet another Conference (a.k.a. YaC). It became an annual technological event, bringing together specialists interested in the IT industry.

Yandex released its own music service, offering users the possibility to listen to legal, high-quality recordings for free. At the start it had about 800,000 tracks; later that number grew to millions.
Several other new services also appeared in the same year — Yandex.Realty, Yandex.Job and Yandex.Amenities — all aggregators, which collect data and help users find what they’re looking for.