Yandex.Fotki Photo Service Launches Face Recognition

MOSCOW, January 24, 2012. Yandex.Fotki, Yandex’s (NASDAQ:YNDX) photo hosting service, has implemented Face.com’s facial recognition technology for fast and easy tagging of photos. The service can now automatically detect human faces and “recognize” previously tagged people.

After someone has been tagged in photos uploaded to Yandex.Fotki a couple of times, the service learns to “know” this person and starts suggesting familiar tags when the user needs to tag new photos of this person. All the user has to do is confirm the tag for it to appear on the photos. People in photos uploaded to the service can be tagged with their Yandex.Fotki account name or with any other name.

Tagging allows for fast and easy photo search. This is especially useful for finding photos with a specific person. Using photo search on Yandex.Fotki, one can easily find all photos tagged ‘Ivan’ or ‘brother’ within one user account. The service can also find and show all photos of a person with a Yandex.Fotki account uploaded to different accounts on the service, if they have been tagged with their Yandex.Fotki name.

Users can tag photos in their own account, as well as photos uploaded by someone else. Tagging is possible only if it was allowed by the owner of a photo. The owner can also remove any tags made by other users.

Having been available on the market for quite a while, Face.com’s facial recognition technology has successfully been implemented in popular social networking websites. In fall 2010, Yandex acquired a minority stake in Face.com as part of its startup support program.

About Yandex.Fotki

Yandex.Fotki is a free photo hosting service providing an unlimited storage space for photos and albums. In November 2011, the service's monthly user audience in Russia was 10.7 million, according to comScore. Currently, Yandex.Fotki sees over 260,000 new images uploaded to the service every day.

About Yandex

Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) is the leading internet company in Russia, operating the country’s most popular search engine and most visited website. Yandex also operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey. Yandex’s mission is to answer any question internet users may have.

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

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