History of Yandex

The history of Yandex dates back to 1990, when Arcadia Inc., which later became CompTek, initially developed two informational search systems: the International Classifier of Inventions and the Goods and Services Classifier. These systems provided the foundation for Yandex’s technology.

In 1993, the founders of CompTek created Yandex as a search mechanism for the Russian language. Some of our portal’s users have speculated on the etymological origins of the word. One of the more imaginative theories suggested a correlation of “Yan” to the white and “sunny” half of the Yin-Yang symbol. To put the rumors to rest on the meaning of the name, the two founders, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, coined the term “Yandex” as an acronym for the phrase “Yet Another Indexer.”

From 1993 to 1994, Yandex’s developers collaborated with the Russian Academy of Sciences to enhance the system’s linguistic capabilities, tailoring it to the Russian language. As an “inflective” language, Russian uses numerous word variations to reflect grammatical purpose and meaning. A key technological advantage of Yandex is that it automatically searches all possible forms of a given word, making each search more accurate.

Another important feature of Yandex’s search technology is morphology hypotheses building, that takes into account the distance between the searched words within sentences and paragraphs. Furthermore, Yandex.ru indexes and searches documents in the major Cyrillic languages — Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian — as well as in English, French, and German that might be of interest to the Russian-speaking audience

From 1997 to 2007, the size of the Russian language portion of the Internet grew from a mere four gigabytes to approximately 28 thousand gigabytes. The Yandex search technology has kept up without missing a beat, with average search times measuring fractions of a second.

Yandex has also spearheaded the introduction of contextual advertisements on the Russian Internet, and placed the first contextual banner on Yandex.ru in 1998.

Amid these technological developments, the founders of CompTek formally established Yandex as a standalone company in 2000. Ru-Net Holdings, an affiliate of Baring Vostok Capital Partners, invested $5.3 million in the new company. Some CompTek shareholders together with Ru-Net Holdings became shareholders of the newly created company. Arkady Volozh left his position of CEO at CompTek to become the CEO of Yandex and remains in that position today.

In April 2000, Yandex television advertising campaign debuted with the first commercial ever for an Internet company on Russian TV.

Yandex was one of the first search engines to use it’s search technology in so-called “parallel data array.” In 2000, the site introduced its News and Shopping search capabilities, and today has expanded to offer a wide variety of specialized, parallel search capabilities for news, maps, merchandise, local addresses, blogs and images.

The News search features the proprietary Facts Extraction technology, which streamlines search results and provides additional related information. Yandex developed this technology to enable algorithmic grouping of news stories by subject. It also automatically generates “Press portraits” — biographical data about the people covered in the news stories. Press portraits typically include a person’s birth date and place, occupation (former and current), and any public statements quoted in the mass media. Yandex.News also uses Yandex.Maps to show the location of a particular news event.

Yandex’s “Clean Mail” principle of email service, which was introduced in 2004, boasts email free of spam and viruses. Yandex.Mail currently offers unlimited storage space for users and lets them disable advertisements in their mailboxes. All incoming and outgoing mail is checked by antiviral software, and Yandex.Mail also uses the proprietary spam-protection software Spamooborona™. Every day, Spamooborona protects the mailboxes of hundreds of thousands of Yandex.Mail users, filtering out approximately 95 percent of junk email. After Spamooborona proved to be an effective solution to guard against spam, Yandex developed and marketed a commercial version of the software, which was put on the market in 2005. Since that time, hundreds of companies adopted Spamooborona to keep their email clean of spam.

In addition to Yandex.ru portal, Yandex’s search functionality can be used on other websites and on personal computers. Yandex.Server is a search solution for web servers, and Yandesk is an application for indexing and searching for local and network files on a personal computer and on the local network.

Yandex’s services are algorithm driven and highly automated. They allow our users to do many things by themselves, from simple things like increasing the storage space of a mail box, to complex tasks like starting and monitoring advertising campaigns or paying for goods, services and utilities using our online payment system.

While the level of automation is high, Yandex does offer human support to current and potential users of all its services. There are special support teams at Yandex always ready to solve a problem or to give advice. Since 2004, Yandex has arranged seminars to educate existing and potential advertisers about the advertising technologies of Yandex in many cities across Russia and Ukraine.

Yandex is proud of its strong support for core sciences and mathematics related to development of the Internet. In 2004, Yandex established its first grant program. More then 500 academics contributed their research papers for consideration. In 2006, eight college researchers from Russia, Finland and Ukraine were granted awards. The winning submissions are available to the public online.

Today, for many Russian-speaking people, the word ‘Yandex’ has become synonymous with the word ‘Internet.’ Indeed, a commonly heard answer to questions is “Why are you asking me? Ask Yandex.” Yandex has begun to transform society with a daily audience that has reached eight million visitors and continues to grow.