Yandex, the most popular Russian internet search engine, has been named a 2008 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum will hold its annual meeting in January 2008 in Davos, Switzerland.
Russia is one of the largest and fastest-growing internet markets in the world with over 28 million internet users. Russia is fairly unique because it is one of the countries where a local search engine has remained the top search engine (in many countries Google is the top search engine). Yadex’s market share is currently about 55 percent of the Russian internet search engine market.
Yandex was named a 2008 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum because it was selected from a field of 273 nominees from a number of industries, including energy, the environment, biotechnology, health and information technology. Past winners of the “Technology Pioneer” award in the IT category include Google, Mozilla, and Encore Software.
The list of this year’s 38 winners can be found here but I’ve listed the IT category below:
AdMob Inc. USA
Arteris, Inc. France/USA
Clearwire Corporation, USA
Garlik Limited, UK
Imaginatik, UK
Innovative Silicon Inc. USA / Switzerland
Kayak.com, USA
Lumio Inc. USA
MEDIO SYSTEMS, USA
Meraki Inc. USA
Polar Rose AB, Sweden
QlikTech International, USA
Roundbox, USA
SpeedBit Ltd. Israel
Transclick Inc. USA
Wikimedia Foundation Inc. USA
Yandex LLC, Russia
Yandex is the largest portal in Russian Internet today, which offers its users key internet services. According to research studies conducted by Gallup Media, FOM and Comcon, Yandex is the largest resource in Russian Internet, based on the audience size and internet penetration.
Among the services being offered by Yandex are an internet search engine, a directory of web sites by themes, free e-mail, latest news, and Spam protection system (Spamooborona), free web hosting (Narod), encyclopedia, dictionaries, comparison shopping system (Market) and many more. By 2006, our audience has reached 4 M visitors a day and continues to grow.
The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Incorporated as a foundation in 1971, and based in Geneva, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum is impartial and not for-profit; it is tied to no political, partisan or national interests.