OREANDA-NEWS.  January 31, 2012. Yandex's (NASDAQ: YNDX) user audience in Turkey has been growing steadily since launch and recently exceeded 100,000 unique visitors per day, according to the company's web stats tool Yandex.Metrica. Yandex Search, the company's search engine, and its map service, Yandex.Maps, are the major attractions for Turkish visitors.

“A search service, just like any other web service, cannot exist or develop without users and a steady increase in users signals interest in our service in Turkey, a new market for Yandex,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex. “The product that we launched in the Turkish market last September was of the best quality achievable in a lab, and our search algorithms have been continually improving ever since, based on real-life search queries supplied by users. The more feedback we receive, the better our search service becomes.”

Yandex can now better understand both user queries and web documents in Turkish, returning relevant search results regardless of a specific variant of spelling. The search engine's Turkish index has grown 20% in the past four months, including web pages in the Turkish segment of Facebook, which have tripled in Yandex's search database.

The Turkish version of Yandex has also become available on mobile devices supporting popular operating systems. In addition, the company has localized its Yandex.Maps app for iPhone, Android and Java for Turkish users. More than 130,000 people have already installed this application on their mobile devices.

Yandex rolled out yandex.com.tr on September 20, 2011. Currently, together with the search service, the web portal offers its visitors local maps with traffic information and street views, email, news aggregation, image or video search, as well as translation from Turkish to English and back. In addition to having an opportunity to power their websites with Yandex's search engine, website owners can benefit from using the company's Ya.Webmaster service.