Russian Search Engine Yandex Showing Up

In the last four or five days a new search engine is starting to show up in my sitemeter listings.  (Well, it's new to my blog anyway)  In Western script it's listed as Yandex. (Go down to referring URL):

When I click on the referring URL, I get a page like this:

Yandex says about itself:

Yandex today

Yandex is Russia’s largest internet company, whose websites attract a workday audience of more than 12 million users (as of the start of 2009) from Russia, Ukraine and other countries.

1. What Yandex Does

Give answers

Our major goal is to give answers to users’ questions.

Questions can be explicit or implicit. Explicit questions are typed right in Yandex’s search box and return answers to users in the form of search results. To answer implicit questions like “what is the weather like today”, “is there anything important going on now”, “can I drive downtown without traffic jams” Yandex offers its users specialized information services.

World-class technology

Russia is one of the few countries with homegrown world-class internet technologies. Besides Russia, local search engines lead in the US, China, South Korea and the Czech Republic.

Among the technologies developed by Yandex, many are pioneers in their niches. Yandex was the first to use Russian language morphology in information search (even before the internet came to Russia) and the first to launch parallel search (simultaneous search in multiple sets of information). Since 2002, clients of the Yandex.Mail service have been protected by Spamooborona – the first Russian internet anti-spam technology implemented in a mass online service, attracting a million-strong audience. The Yandex.News service uses a proprietary fact extraction technology to perform citation search and to form “press-portraits”. Yandex was also the first to introduce a system of text-based advertising in Russia. . .

Further down, I found this interesting:

3. Team

The Yandex team counts more than fifteen hundred people in different cities and countries. One of the documents that our new employees read first when they start with the company is “The Charter”, which begins with:

Peaceful coexistence

"Yandex is a very open company. Independent thinking, open exchange of opinions and attention to alternative points of view are strongly encouraged. Being a team player is prerequisite for all Yandex employees. Team means everyone working within the company, not only immediate colleagues. It is us together who make the Yandex loved by web users, respected by partners and clients.

People in different departments often see the same problem from different angles – this is exactly what makes Yandex develop successfully. That is why it is important to be tolerant and considerate of others’ opinion. Make an a priori allowance that a conflicting opinion is no less valid than yours."

Yandex’s major asset is its team of top notch specialists. Yandex looks out for professionals and assists in their growth by running regular specialist competitions and supporting the School of Data Analysis, founded by the company to offer free tuition for students with the goal to cultivate specialists in data analysis and information extraction from the internet, to conduct fundamental research in this field and to provide talent for Yandex’s applied projects.

Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia in terms of the number of engineers it hires. Currently, Yandex has branches in Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the US (Burlington, CA).   [This continues here.]

Wikipedia's entry begins this way:

Yandex

Type	Private
Founded	1997
Headquarters	Moscow
Key people	Arkady Volozh, CEO
Industry	Internet Search Engine
Products	N/A
Revenue	▲50% US$ 300 Million (2008)
Employees	over 1600[1] (2009)
Website	http://www.yandex.ru/

Arkady Volozh is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Yandex

Yandex (Russian: Я́ндекс) 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 "Языково́й (language) Index". The Russian word "Я" corresponds to English "I" (as the singular first-person pronoun), making "Яndex" a bilingual pun on "index".

[edit] Market Share

According to research studies conducted by TNS, FOM, and Comcon, Yandex is the largest resource and largest search engine in Russian Internet, based on the audience size and internet penetration.
The closest competitors of Yandex in the Russian market are Rambler and Mail.ru. Although services like Google and Yahoo! are also used by Russian users and have Russian-language interfaces, Google has about 22.6% of search engine generated traffic, whereas Russian sites (including Yandex) have around 56.9%.^[2][3] Yandex is therefore one of the national non-English-language search engines (with among others Naver, Seznam.cz and Baidu) that outrun Google in their countries.
One of the Yandex's largest advantages for Russian-language users is recognition of Russian inflection in search queries. ^[4]

Bet you weren't expecting to see this here.  Me neither.