Massive Yandex code leak reveals Russian search engine’s ranking factors

Practically 45GB of supply code recordsdata, allegedly stolen by a former worker, have revealed the underpinnings of Russian tech large Yandex’s many apps and providers. It additionally revealed key rating components for Yandex’s search engine, the type virtually by no means revealed in public.

The “Yandex git sources” have been posted as a torrent file on January 25 and present recordsdata seemingly taken in July 2022 and courting again to February 2022. Software engineer Arseniy Shestakov claims that he verified with present and former Yandex staff that some archives “for certain comprise trendy supply code for firm providers.” Yandex told security blog BleepingComputer that “Yandex was not hacked” and that the leak got here from a former worker. Yandex said that it didn’t “see any menace to person knowledge or platform efficiency.”

The recordsdata notably date to February 2022, when Russia started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A former govt at Yandex instructed BleepingComputer that the leak was “political” and famous that the previous worker had not tried to promote the code to Yandex rivals. Anti-spam code was additionally not leaked.

Whereas it isn’t clear whether or not there are safety or structural implications of Yandex’s supply code revelation, the leak of 1,922 ranking factors in Yandex’s search algorithm is definitely making waves. search engine optimisation advisor Martin MacDonald described the hack on Twitter as “most likely essentially the most fascinating factor to have occurred in search engine optimisation in years” (as noted by Search Engine Land). In a thread detailing a number of the extra notable components, researcher Alex Buraks suggests that “there’s numerous helpful data for Google search engine optimisation as nicely.”

Yandex, the fourth-ranked search engine by quantity, purportedly employs a number of ex-Google staff. Yandex tracks a lot of Google’s rating components, identifiable in its code, and competes closely with Google. Google’s Russian division recently filed for bankruptcy after dropping its financial institution accounts and cost providers. Buraks notes that the primary consider Yandex’s record of rating components is “PAGE_RANK,” which is seemingly tied to the foundational algorithm created by Google’s co-founders.

As detailed by Buraks (in two threads), Yandex’s engine favors pages that:

• Aren’t too outdated
• Have numerous natural visitors (distinctive guests) and fewer search-driven visitors
• Have fewer numbers and slashes of their URL
• Have optimized code somewhat than “arduous pessimization,” with a “PR=0”
• Are hosted on dependable servers
• Occur to be Wikipedia pages or are linked from Wikipedia
• Are hosted or linked from higher-level pages on a site
• Have key phrases of their URL (as much as three)

You possibly can search and click on by means of all of the components on Rob Ousbey’s compiled search tool. You may discover that just about 1,000 of the rating components have the tag “TG_DEPRECATED,” and greater than 200 are listed as “TG_UNUSED.” As a result of the code is from February 2022 and was grabbed in July 2022, Yandex’s search has definitely modified since. However the leak gives a uncommon look into how search rankings are put collectively at a website that providers one of many world’s largest nations.

Yandex beforehand noticed its search engine code stroll out the door in 2015, when a former worker tried to sell it on the black market for $28,000 to fund his personal startup. The surprisingly low determine for the core code of Yandex’s major product steered he was unaware of its actual worth. That worker was sentenced to a suspended two years in jail, and the code was by no means seen publicly.