Yandex 2003

2003 was the first New Year that Yandex celebrated as a profitable company. That same year the Board of Directors made the decision to pay out dividends to its shareholders, the first dividends to ever be paid in the Russian internet.

Yandex.Mail made it possible to switch off ads on the service page, doubled mailbox size and announced the fight against spam to be a primary goal of the service. Yandex started to seek for not only HTML , but also RTF, PDF and DOC files. Yandex also announced that it is ready to provide each resident of Russia with an answer for one question per month because the monthly number of search requests on Yandex became equal to the figure of the population of Russia — 147mln.

The Yandex search engine software, called Yandex.Site was launched on the official website of the President of the Russian Federation.

The Yandex licensed Israeli Search Cup was successfully held by Yandex and cable TV companies.

In summer 2003, Yandex.News went through major changes and improvements. The users were offered a completely new and original service: news were categorized by topic and brought out to the Yandex home page in a “News of the Day” summary.

The home page design was changed again together with a search results page, but this time the users had an opportunity to test the new design before its final implementation and provide their feedback and personal opinion.

The annual fourth Russian Internet Search Cup was held.

Yandex also released a new line of search solutions, such as Yandex.Server, Yandex.Publisher and Yandex.SDK.

In November, the self serve advertising program, Yandex.Direct shifted onto a new business model: Cost per Click (CPC) Yandex introduced a search results export to XML feature.

Yandex, together with the 1C and Nikita companies, launched the first in Russia multi-channel online game called “Sphere”.