Yandex 2000

In 2000, shareholders of CompTek, the company that had created and had been developing the project called Yandex since 1997, established the new standalone company called Yandex. Some CompTek shareholders, including the leading search engine developers together with Ru-Net Holdings, an affiliate of Baring Vostok Capital Partners became shareholders of the newly created company. Arkady Volozh left his position of CEO at CompTek and became the CEO of Yandex.

The newly established company legalized all rights for the Yandex trademark and for the Yandex.ru domain, along with the Yandex search technology and the group of software products under the Yandex brand. Moreover, the recently created project www.narod.ru (free web hosting and website building tools) also became a part of Yandex.

In April, the first Yandex Ad campaign was broadcasted on NTV, and the Yandex slogan “Everything will be found!” was first announced.

The same year Yandex started to search not just for web pages, but also for news and goods, and launched a site directory with the new (faceted) description of the sites. The concepts and classification principles were developed by the Yandex team.