September 20, 2005
Kiev, September 20, 2005. The first product of the Ukrainian representative office of Yandex is the home page for the Ukrainian portal, www.yandex.ua. The announcement was made today at the press conference by Arkadiy Volozh, Yandex CEO, and Sergey Petrenko, head of Yandex.Ukraine.
The services presented at www.yandex.ua are customized for Ukrainian citizens. In the first place, these are a search exclusively in Ukrainian web-sites, and Ukrainian news (information overview of the day, automatically compiled for Ukraine). The portal also enables the users to monitor exchange rates set by the National Bank of Ukraine (hryvnia to dollar, euro, and other currencies), see the TV program (15 Ukrainian channels), and get the weather forecast in different regions of Ukraine (more than 30 cities).
“To develop Internet services for users and customers in Ukraine we have to work from within the Ukrainian market. Thus Yandex.Ukraine got the tasks of managing the Ukrainian portal and dealing with sales in the country,“ explained Arkadiy Volozh, Yandex CEO. “The opening of a representative office also sped up our technological development: for example, we started embedding Ukrainian morphology in the Yandex search engine. Now the progress will be faster, follow www.yandex.ua.“
“We are open for cooperation with information providers: mass media, online stores, and directory web-sites,“ said Sergey Petrenko, head of Yandex.Ukraine. “In addition, one of our objectives is developing the market of Internet advertisement, primarily search advertisement. In this area, we’ll be happy to work together with other players on the Ukrainian Internet market and with advertising agencies.“
Half a million of Ukrainian citizens use Yandex services in a week. The near-term plans of the portal include adding Ukrainian cities to Yandex.Maps, increasing the number of Ukrainian partners of Yandex.Market and Yandex.News, and improving search in Ukrainian web-sites. In addition, Yandex also has plans to implement offline projects, particularly Yandex.WiFi (with several Ukrainian restaurants already participating), seminars (the first one was held in Kiev in summer), and Internet search competitions (the Yandex Cup).
