MOSCOW and THE HAGUE, Netherlands, July 25, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Yandex (Nasdaq:YNDX) today announced with great sadness the sudden death of Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Ilya Segalovich.

CEO Arkady Volozh commented, "Ilya was a friend of life and this is a terrible personal loss. Ilya's contributions to the founding and development of Yandex were invaluable. More importantly, his philanthropic contributions touched many children in need. My thoughts and those of all of the Yandex family are with Ilya's family at this difficult time. We know that the strong technical team Ilya helped to build will carry on the work Ilya cared so passionately about. Ilya was an encyclopedia in technology and his highest ethical standards has always set the landmark for us all."

Mr. Segalovich had been diagnosed with a treatable form of cancer and was responding well to treatment and working a full schedule, before unexpectedly succumbing to complications last night.

Ilya Segalovich co-founded Yandex more than 20 years ago. He began his career working on information retrieval technologies in 1990 at Arkadia Company, and later led the retrieval systems department for CompTek International. In 2000 Ilya Segalovich left CompTek International to become the CTO of Yandex. Ilya helped create the National Corpus of Russian Language (Ruscorpora) and ROMIP, the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar. He also co-founded and supports Maria's Children Art Rehabilitation Center for orphans and children with special needs.

About Yandex

Yandex (Nasdaq:YNDX) is one of Europe's largest internet companies, providing the world with search and online services one market at a time. Yandex's mission is to help users solve their everyday problems by building people-centric products and services. Based on innovative technologies, the company offers the most relevant, locally tailored experience on all digital platforms and devices. Yandex is the leading internet search service in Russia with 61.6% of the country's search market (according to LiveInternet, June 2013) and a monthly audience of 54.3 million (according to comScore, May 2013). Yandex also operates in Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. More information about Yandex can be found at http://company.yandex.com.