The Russian President was shown around the company and told about its operations by Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh and branch manager Arkady Borkovsky.
Yandex Labs is a branch of the Russian company Yandex. Yandex Labs, a research Silicon Valley-based company, was founded in 2008 and is at present located in Palo Alto, CA.
The main objective of Yandex Labs and its 12 employees is to increase the Yandex system's scope, including the quality of the search algorithm for Russian Internet users, and to introduce new technologies. The company's location was chosen because of its proximity to the main research centres of major IT corporations, which are based around Stanford University. In addition, one of the company's main goals is to acquire new contacts among other big market players in this field.
Russian company Yandex, which was registered in 2000, owns the same name search engine and an Internet portal. The Yandex search engine ranks seventh in the world by the number of searches performed.
The company employs about 2,000 people and generated 8.7 billion rubles (about $280 million) in revenues in 2009.
On May 19, 2010 Yandex launched an English-language version of its search engine on the www.yandex.com website, which made it an international player.