Makhijani will be president and chief executive of Yandex Labs, the company said Friday.
"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," said Arkady Volozh, CEO of parent company Yandex. "We did not hesitate to go the extra mile to find this rare talent." (Though with Yahoo's recent management turmoil, the distance looks to have been shortened considerably.)
Now might be a good time to join Yandex, which maintains an edge over Google in Russia if not the globe. Yandex appears bound for an initial public offering soon on Nasdaq, hoping to raise $1.5 billion to $2 billion, according to a recent Reuters report.
Yandex, a Russian search engine, plans to raise $1.5 billion to $2 billion in an initial public offering this fall, Reuters reported Tuesday.
The funding is based on an overall valuation of about $5 billion, according to an unnamed source. Reuters also cited Russian media reports that Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and Renaissance Capital are managing the IPO on Nasdaq.
Yandex has about 8 million unique users per day, the company said. Its co-founders are Chief Executive Arkady Volozh and Chief Technology Officer Ilya Segalovich. The company's technology began as a linguistics project at the Russian Academy of Sciences project to build a search system for the Soviet government.
The Yandex.ru Web site was launched in 1997, and the company now has become a portal site with photo sharing, social networking, an online payment system, free Web site hosting, and other features.
Google lags Yandex in Russian search. However, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in an interview that the company thinks it's improved its search technology to better deal with the Russian language.
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