Yandex Labs to Open in Silicon Valley

– Vishal Makhijani to serve as President and CEO of US-based Lab –

Yandex today announced the formation of a U.S. technology and business development facility. The new organization, "Yandex Labs," will be located in the San Francisco Bay area. Vishal Makhijani, formerly SVP and General Manager of Yahoo!'s Search Group, has been appointed as President and CEO of the new organization, reporting directly to Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex.

"We did not hesitate to go the extra mile to find this rare talent,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex, the parent company. “We are excited to add a leading technology and business veteran in Silicon Valley to the Yandex team. Vish and his group at Yandex Labs will help to develop and improve Yandex’s core technology capabilities including the quality of algorithmic search for the Russian audience."

Mr. Makhijani served in a variety of key leadership roles at Yahoo! for the past 5 years, most recently as Senior Vice President of Yahoo!'s Search Group. In this position he managed products such as Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Answers, Delicious, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Personals and Yahoo! Travel.

Prior to his Search Group role, Mr. Makhijani was a key member of the Search and International leadership team at Yahoo!. He led the sale of Overture KK to Yahoo! Japan, the launch of the company’s proprietary search engine in international markets and the international launch of Panama, Yahoo!’s search advertising system. In 2003, Mr. Makhijani was also instrumental in the sale of Inktomi to Yahoo!. Inktomi’s Web search technology later became the foundation of Yahoo’s search efforts.

About Yandex

Yandex answers almost 1 billion search queries a month and is a leading search provider in Russia. It serves Russian-speaking users around the world.

U.S. contact information:

Esther Dyson, Yandex board member, edyson@edventure.com

Contact:
Media Relations
Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com