Yandex source code leak
A 44GB archive of Yandex source code leaked publicly, exposing roughly 1,900 ranking factors from a major search engine.
What changed
On 25 January 2023 an archive of about 44GB of Yandex source code was published on a hacking forum by a former employee. It included the ranking codebase, and analysts extracted a list of approximately 1,900 named ranking factors covering link, behavioural, host-level and freshness signals. Yandex confirmed the code was genuine but said it was an outdated repository snapshot rather than current production code. It remains the only large-scale public exposure of a commercial web search engine's ranking factor list, and although Yandex is not Google, several concepts in it matched long-standing industry hypotheses.
Timing
Rollout began 25 January 2023. No completion date was announced. Rankings typically remain unstable for the whole rollout window, so measurements taken inside it are not a reliable read on the outcome.