Russia's most popular search engine has officially announced plans to open a labs office in Silicon Valley. This news began to leak last week with the departure of Yahoo SVP and General Manager of Search, Vishal Makhijani. Makhijani will be President of Yandex Labs in the Bay Area, and will report directly to the CEO of Yandex.
Yandex says it sees about 1 billion searches per month. Last month, Google saw 6.8 billion searches, while Yahoo saw 2.2 billion, according to comScore. Yandex came in third in European search market share data for the month of March.
"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 extend and improve Yandex's core technology capabilities including the quality of algorithmic search for the Russian audience."
What do you think of Mr. Makhijani's move to Yandex? Let us know in the comments.
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