High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Yandex is a Russian search engine, the world's second largest non-English-language web portal, and the largest Russian-language web portal. Yandex was launched in 1997. Its name can be explained as "Yet Another iNDEXer" (yandex) or "????????? (language) Index". The Russian word "?" corresponds to English "I" (as the singular first-person pronoun), making "?ndex" a bilingual pun on "index". Since 2001, Yandex has conducted regular Internet search contests named "Yandex Cup" with several thousands of participants and valuable prizes.