OREANDA-NEWS. September 20, 2011. Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) today announced that it has launched a web portal in Turkey. Yandex’s search engine and a range of other services created specifically for web users in this country are now available at yandex.com.tr. The company has also opened an office in Istanbul.

The search engine at yandex.com.tr takes into account the structure of the Turkish language, features an auto-correction function and can differentiate between synonyms. Just like the company’s Russian search engine, the search system in Turkey retrieves much more than web links, including news, pictures and videos. Yandex search users can enter just a line of poetry in Turkish to find a poem, or see what a particular color looks like after typing its name in the search bar. In addition to the search function, yandex.com.tr also offers Mail, News, Translation and other services.

“It’s the first time we start offering web search services in a country where almost nobody speaks any Russian,” says Arkady Volozh, Yandex CEO. “We have considered countries with a well-developed internet market, a growing web user audience and a lot of local language content. Turkey was a clear first choice. Instead of just localizing our services for this country, we custom-built an entirely new product – tailored specifically to web users in Turkey. Rolling out this new product involved developing a number of new technologies, such as a technology for storing web documents in different languages and a document prioritization technology. We expect to make broader use of these technologies in the future.”

“Technology alone is not enough to make a good search engine,” says Alisher Hasanov, Product Director at Yandex.Turkey. “We also need an understanding of the local culture, language and users’ preferences. Our launch in Turkey would not have been possible without our Turkish team. Currently, there are a couple dozen people working in our Istanbul office, including analysts, managers and translators. The majority of our team in Turkey are directly involved with search. Our local Turkish team defines our core direction in this country.”

Yandex intends to continue investing time and resources in its portal in Turkey, both in terms of search quality and expanding the range of services available in the future on yandex.com.tr.