Yandex whose search engine is who is the owner. Who owns Yandex

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Who owns Yandex?

The emergence of the company's name is associated with the appearance of an English word made up of a three-word phrase: yet another indexer, meaning yet another indexer. ? The authors of the new word were Ilya Segalovich, he was the main developer search engine Yandex.Ru, and programmer Arkady Volozh. The introduction of this search engine led to the fact that the team that created the Yandex search system was able to leave CompTek and become independent. New company adopted the now familiar name Yandex.

The question of who owns Yandex sounds rhetorical. You can answer that it belongs to the people who created search program, where it all started. However, not all so simple. Having become independent, the Yandex company registered abroad in the Netherlands as Yandex N.V. JSC, owning 100% of the authorized capital, and in Russia it received registration as Yandex LLC. By this time he had become general director company Arkady Volozh explains this by saying that they are not satisfied with the existing Russian legislation regarding joint stock companies. Ilya Segalovich, director of the technology development company, assured everyone that the entire company team considers Yandex a Russian company, because the company pays taxes to Russia, serves Russia, creates jobs for Russian specialists and regularly pays decent salaries to employees. And registration in the Netherlands is a concession to foreign shareholders who are afraid of unstable Russian legislation. Now the question arises, who owns Yandex in a financial sense.

At the beginning of the second quarter of 2000, almost a third of Yandex shares were acquired by the ru-Net Holdings fund, paying $5.28 million. Managers and leading specialists of the company had the opportunity to become shareholders. Naturally, the owners of the largest blocks of shares were Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh. In total, they have almost half of all shares of Yandex.

Over time, since the beginning of the century, there have been changes in the ownership of Yandex.Ru. It is impossible to achieve clarity on this issue. There is no clear data about this, but if you think logically, the company currently belongs to Cyprus and America, there were some legal proceedings about which there is no specific data in the press, but if you look at where the yandex.com domain is registered, then the conclusion suggests itself.

Yandex is a Russian IT company, which owns the Internet search system and Internet portal of the same name. The Yandex search engine is 5th among search sites in the world in terms of the number of processed search queries. As of October 16, 2012, according to Alexa.com rankings, In terms of popularity, the website yandex.ru ranks 20th in the world and 1st in Russia.

The search engine Yandex.ru was officially announced on September 23, 1997, and at first developed within the framework of CompTek International. Yandex was formed as a separate company in 2000. In May 2011, Yandex held an initial public offering, earning more from it than any Internet company since its IPO. Google search engine in 2004.

The main and priority direction of the company is the development of a search engine, but over the years, Yandex has become a multi-portal. In 2011, Yandex provides more than 30 services. The most popular are: Yandex.Pictures, Yandex.Mail, Yandex.Maps, Yandex.News, Yandex.Weather and others.

However, the concept of Yandex as a connection between an Internet search engine and all other things that greatly facilitate the everyday life of an Internet user was not born immediately, and neither was the search technology itself. As befits every ambitious project, it was preceded by a long and winding path, the history of which began back in the days when global network in Russia they spoke only in the depths of scientific research institutes.

Yandex video stories on Russia 24 channel in the Technopark program

Background: voluntary-obligatory cooperative

The year was 1988. At that time, mathematician and programmer Arkady Volozh, who had just completed his studies, worked at the Institute of Control Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he investigated the possibility of processing large amounts of data, and the management Soviet Union tried to put the country on the feet of a market economy. Adopted Law they began to implement the idea of ​​cooperation on a scale characteristic of Soviet leaders, and the head of the department where Volozh worked, without further hesitation, appointed him co-founder of the newly formed cooperative.

Since enterprises at that time lacked automated workplaces, and the experience of the institute’s workers could solve this problem, it was decided to import Austrian personal computers, exchanging them (it was a wonderful time!) for seeds. However, Arkady was not directly involved in selling computers, but only performed technical work.

At that time, he met an American student, Robert Stubblebine, who had come on guard, from whom he took English lessons. But the common interests of the two young people were not limited to foreign languages, and already in 1989 they jointly founded the company CompTek, which sold computer equipment. So the company could specialize only in hardware, if not for Volozh’s old connections.

Teach your computer to understand Russian

Having become deeply involved in commerce, Arkady Volozh did not give up his main place of work. At the institute, he continued to work on a program focused on searching for information in large volumes of text data. Then Arkady came up with the idea that it was necessary to somehow take into account the rich inflection inherent in the Russian language. And at that moment there was a person who was able to help cope with this not an easy task. It was Arkady Borkovsky, who studied problems of computer linguistics at the Academy of Sciences. At the same time, the first important task appeared, where it was possible to successfully apply existing developments: the Institute of Patent Information needed a searchable classifier of inventions.

So two Arkady, Borkovsky and Volozh, created a company called Arcadia. They were joined by several programmers, among whom was Ilya Segalovich, Volozh’s friend since school. So, after much effort, the distribution kit of the “International Classifier of Inventions” was ready. It was also decided to sell it as a product for organizations working with patents.

At first, everything worked out well: the product was sold for about three years, and there was enough money to pay employees and advertise in newspapers. Then the “Classifier of Goods and Services” was developed. But the economy in the country dictated its own conditions in the early nineties, and buying such software products have become significantly worse. On the other hand, Volozh's second company, CompTek, was gaining momentum by supplying computers and deploying networks to financial institutions. At that moment, a bold step was taken to preserve existing promising developments in the absence of demand: in 1993, it was decided to transform the small staff of Arcadia into the CompTek programming department.

Meanwhile, work continued on improving the search engine code. A team of specialists in the field of structural linguistics, led by Yuri Apresyan, provided a high-quality dictionary, and Ilya Segalovich and a group of programmers began to integrate it into the existing technology, which made the search capabilities even wider. The new CompTek department then took on more complex tasks. In 1994, it was decided to create a system for working with the Synodal Translation of the Bible, and in 1995, an academic publication of Pushkin and Griboyedov for the Institute of World Literature.

Origin of the word "Yandex"

When in 1993 it became clear that work on a new technology for searching Russian-language texts would continue, it was decided to come up with a simple and catchy name for it. Ilya began to write down words on a piece of paper that were related to technology. However, no original solutions came to mind. Then he went a different way. At that time, many new programs for UNIX-like systems due to the lack of desire to come up with an original name, they were simply called by adding the combination “yet another” to any word, meaning “one more.” This is how “yet another indexer” appeared - “yet another indexer” or Yandex. I liked this name, especially since it can be deciphered as Language Index. Arkady suggested replacing the combination “ya” with the Russian “ya” to emphasize the focus on the Russian language. This is how Yandex appeared.

Then Artemy Lebedev offered an interesting interpretation: “I” in the word “Index” is translated into Russian as “I”. It turned out to be a kind of “index” in Russian. Already during the operation of the site, users came up with new transcript with the division of the Internet in the spirit of Eastern philosophy into INDEX and YANDEX. But these two interpretations appeared much later, after Yandex went online. So far, there was only technology that was tied to specific software products.

New Yandex for the new Internet

Even while working on the academic edition of the classics, an algorithm for constructing hypotheses was created. This algorithm made it possible to avoid being strictly tied to the dictionary that was available in the program. And it worked as follows. If during the search process any unfamiliar word comes across, the algorithm analyzes it and predicts the inflection paradigm, using an already existing dictionary, just as native speakers, having once heard new term, can consume it in various forms.

Then, in 1996, the developers realized that new technology you can develop and sell on your own, without being tied to specific texts. This idea was a very timely solution, since many companies needed similar systems search, and the Internet was gaining momentum in the country. In the fall of the same year, the opportunity arose to show the results of this work.

CompTek took part in the Netcom"96 exhibition, where it presented two new products: Yandex.Dict, which was a layer between a search engine that does not understand Russian morphology and the user, and Yandex.Site - search engine, intended for installation on Internet sites. Over time, the first solution became not very popular, but Yandex.Site, which turned into Yandex.Server, continues to be used today on many resources. A little more time passed, and the Yandex line was supplemented with two new products. It was Yandex.CD, which helps you find required document on CD, and Yandex.Lib, a package for developers who need search capabilities for their products.

And on November 25, 1996, Yandex took its first timid step onto the Internet. Any person has the opportunity to perform convenient search Russian-language text using the popular search engine AltaVista. For this, the already mentioned query generation mechanism Yandex.Dict was used. Then it became clear that to create your own search engine, only a small step was needed - to index Russian-language resources own bot. This was a relatively simple task: as soon as the robot was launched, it indexed all available resources, of which there were 5 thousand, which amounted to 4 GB of texts.

At the next exhibition there was an opportunity to show in a favorable light the Yandex-Web solution from CompTek, which is capable of finding everything that is on the network. The yandex.ru resource was opened on September 23, and its presentation took place 2 days later, on September 25, 1997, at the Softool "97 exhibition. The first version of the site with an original “slanted” design was created by Artemy Lebedev (his studio is still working on the external the appearance of Yandex services).

Work for the people

Then it turned out that new service has outgrown the scope of a simple demonstration of the capabilities of Yandex technology. They began to use it regular users, and the number of requests began to increase rapidly. That is why, after two months, the developers taught the search engine natural Russian. Yandex began to understand not only requests made using logical operators, but also ordinary sequences made up of several words. In addition to this new search engine was able to recognize the uniqueness of a document, showing only one copy in the results, and had its own algorithm for assessing relevance, which made it possible to obtain among the first links the resources most relevant to the search query.

Already on September 30, i.e. a week after the opening of Yandex-Web, the first “Yandex fairy tale” appeared, a study of the contents of the Russian Internet with some philosophical overtones, and in December it became known that a link to Yandex would appear in Russian Internet versions Explorer 4.0.

During 1998 the number of indexed texts doubled. To maintain performance, the developers partially changed the search engine algorithms. This year the design has been updated and convenient additions have been added. It is now possible to search among the results, as well as see what other users are looking for in this moment. Academic Search, now called Advanced, has two new features: sorting by date and searching for documents within a specific time range. The introduced “find similar documents” option deserves special attention. Users were able to clarify the request simply by clicking on the appropriate link.

1999 can be called the year of Internet development. Then the amount of information and users increased by an order of magnitude, and meanwhile Yandex came in fourth or fifth place in popularity. For better indexing of the sharply increased volume of data, we launched new robot. It was created with the aim of effectively filtering spam, and also indexed image captions, descriptions and took into account links much better, which made it possible to introduce search functions for one site and links to a specified resource.

To the already existing regularly published “fairy tales”, reflecting with a slight degree of irony the contents of network resources, was added the Index of Inconstancy of Interests of the Internet Population, abbreviated as NINI-index. From January 1, 1999 to January 1, 2005, weekly reports were published reflecting trends in search queries. They represented two five words, the interest in which over the week most sharply changed towards an increase (“finds”) or a decrease (“losses”). Yandex began to communicate more closely with users: a forum about the search engine appeared and the ability to subscribe to changes in search results for the desired query was added. New mechanism, called the “citation index,” now organized resources by importance and popularity, and search in categories made it possible to find information only among sites on a certain topic. It was also introduced " Family search”, designed to prevent pages with obscene or erotic content from appearing in the results.

On December 15, 1999, Yandex and netBridge opened the online auction Molotok.Ru. This was followed by the joint project Narod.Ru, which started on February 15, 2000. Launched under the motto “Build your website in 60 seconds!”, it provided anyone with the opportunity to create personal page. Soon the companies divided their areas of interest, and Molotok.Ru came under full control netBridge, and Narod.Ru is the property of Yandex. The changes that occurred in 1999 finally secured Yandex’s status social service and predestined further development. In just over two years, Yandex gained recognition and earned consistently high traffic, which became the reason for the changes that took place the following year.

Yandex promotion

The success of the new project was predetermined further history its development, which required additional resources and assumed a management model completely different from that used at CompTek. Since 1999, Arkady Volozh, having chosen the promotion of Yandex as his main occupation, began to choose from a variety of potential partners. It was necessary to find people experienced in corporate construction who would not require full transmission management and agreed to invest a sufficient amount of funds.

And in the spring of 2000, an extremely important event occurred: an investment agreement was concluded with the company ru-Net Holdings, under which it received a little more than a third of the search engine. Yandex began to exist independently, separating from CompTek, and Arkady Volozh became the general director of the new company. It was not the company’s style to receive money and do nothing, so an expansion of staff and a grandiose development of the resource immediately followed.

The design changed for the fifth time, and an “ascetic” version of ya.ru appeared. On the other hand, new services have become available, such as Yandex.Bookmarks, Yandex.News, Yandex.Products, Yandex.Guru and Yandex.Mail. The culmination of innovations was the week of launches of new services that took place in June 2000, which ended with the Yandex holiday. In the fall, the Yandex.Bar toolbar was released. Also, 2000 was the year of the beginning of a large-scale advertising campaign, for which the slogan “Everything will be found!” was coined, which is still used today. The second advertising campaign, which started at the end of the year, was held under the slogan “All questions to Yandex.”

New Year 2001 Yandex celebrated with the event “New Year’s Appeal of the People of Russia to the President,” in which everyone could take part. All received “letters” were summarized in single text appeals. In mid-February, Yandex settled at a new address, where it acquired its own server room, since new services and an increasing flow of users required an expansion of the hardware base. By the summer, Yandex was able to top the list of the most visited Russian-language resources for the first time in its history.

In 2001, the Open Russian Cup for Internet Search, also called the Yandex Cup, was established. In the first year there were 2 cups, and until 2009 there were 9 cups and a competition between the winners, the so-called Cup Winners' Cup. Like the previous year, Yandex greeted 2002 with a memorable campaign. This time it was dedicated to the introduction of the euro into circulation.

Meanwhile, Runet was developing, and already in the spring the volume of data indexed by Yandex exceeded the landmark threshold of 1 TB. Users now have the opportunity to search for images using Yandex.Images, and in the summer, together with the PayCash group of companies, an electronic payment system Yandex money. This was a significant step towards expanding the scope of services provided by Yandex, and had a noticeable impact on the Russian Internet as a whole.

Certain improvements related to filtering unwanted correspondence have affected Yandex.Mail. At the end of 2002, three independent services, Podpiri, Guru and Products, were combined into Yandex.Market, a project that continues to be popular today. This year, the company's management set an ambitious goal - to achieve self-sufficiency. It was decided to build a commercial model on contextual advertising, which made it possible not only to complete the task, but also to do it even before all the expected deadlines. The next stage in the development of Yandex has been completed.

Focus on creativity

In 2003 great attention was paid postal service, which has undergone further changes that have made it more convenient. These changes continued the following year: Yandex.Mail users received an unlimited mailbox size and a new “Spam Defense” spam filter. Also in 2003, a transition was made to the eighth version of the design. This time, take part in a two-week test of the new look. home page and anyone could make constructive suggestions. It was slightly modified a year later, and in this form the page existed until 2007.

The Yandex.News service was significantly redesigned, becoming an organized collection of the most important news messages, grouped by topic. Photos and videos appeared in the news. The Internet search itself has also undergone changes: RTF, PDF and DOC documents now appear in the results, which has made it easier to find, for example, the necessary documentation, and XML output has been implemented for webmasters. A year later, support for PPT and XLS formats was added, as well as indexing of sites made in Flash.

In addition to the yandex.ru resource, other company products were also developed. So in 2003, the Yandex search engine started working on the presidential website, and in the fall it was presented new line, which included three solutions: Yandex.Server, which grew out of Yandex.Site, Yandex.Publisher, including Yandex.CD, and Yandex.SDK, which became a continuation of Yandex.Lib. On June 3, 2003, the board of directors decided to pay the first dividends in the history of Russian Internet companies, amounting to $100,000, which was a completely logical step for a self-sustaining company. Yandex received two thirds of its revenue from contextual advertising. The following year, advertising profits tripled, and 2004 showed fantastic growth rates in the profitability of the business model created by Yandex.
Yandex and Google

Meanwhile on Russian market search engines, international players appeared. They had an equally developed technological base and were serious competitors to Yandex. Runet was becoming closer to the West, which required not only maintaining the quality of the services provided, but radically changing everything for the entire company. This affected not only search: all services required a new look. Yandex managers, accustomed to changes, coped with this task: they managed to expand the staff from 200 to 2,000 people, without turning into a dry corporation, but maintaining the developed creative style that users loved.

During this time, many new projects were launched, and existing ones received many improvements. Yandex.Maps was opened for users, which was subsequently closely connected with many other services and became one of priority areas. Yandex.WiFi launched, Yandex.Afisha and other projects were released, many of which were distinguished by their focus on the needs of Russian users. It has become a tradition to hold regional seminars. This approach was correct: Russian company possessed this undeniable advantages ahead of international competitors, which ensured Yandex's victory in the Russian market.

At the same time, with timid steps, the company began to expand its geography, so in 2005 a Ukrainian representative office opened.

Time to expand your horizons

Now Yandex is working on two fronts: the company is trying to improve local services and cover the foreign Internet space. In 2007 it was opened Ukrainian version search yandex.ua, and 2008 was the year the Yandex Labs division, located in California, was opened. In the same year, Yandex carried out significant work aimed at supporting international Internet standards such as Sitemap, and the GZIP, FOAF and MediaRSS protocols. This made it possible to work more efficiently with indexing not only Russian, but also foreign resources.

In the meantime, there was a noticeable change in the Yandex logo: all the letters became Russian and lost their serifs, gaining a technological look.

In 2009, the Snezhinsk program started, providing users with search results that are most relevant to a specific city when required. On the other hand, in the same year, Yandex became deeply involved in foreign content: it began testing a service that provides translation of found foreign sites, which was released in 2011 under the name Yandex.Translation. In May 2010, users were able to search only among foreign sites by enabling the appropriate option or using the yandex.com domain. Then a search for images and videos was added to yandex.com. Yandex.by and the Tatar version of search started working.

At the same time, the number was growing local services for Ukraine and a regional search appeared, called “Poltava”. It was based on Matrixnet technology, used a year earlier in the Snezhinsk program. The Yandex.Maps service, which has grown significantly over several years, has acquired its own mapping company, GIS Technologies. This is how Yandex came to be in 2011, which became another milestone in the development of the company.

At the very beginning of the year, advertisers were offered new service— geo-advertising that offers highlighting organizations on maps and displaying search queries. The Yandex.Fabrika startup investment program was launched, in which not only Russian but also foreign projects could take part.

In May 2011, Yandex made an initial public offering on the high-tech NASDAQ exchange, which turned out to be even more successful than expected. They were placed 14% higher than forecast and rose in value by another 42% on the first day of trading. In terms of the volume of funds raised ($1.3 billion) as a result of the initial offering, Yandex took an honorable second place in the list of Internet companies, not beating only Google, which earned $1.67 billion in 2004. From this moment it begins new page the history of Yandex, which has grown from an ambitious project into a huge company, while successfully maintaining a unique style loved by millions of users.

The Yandex search engine has long become one of the most popular search engines among residents of Russia and the CIS countries. At the beginning of 2013, she was one of the four best searches planets. But few people know how and by whom Yandex was created.

The creation of Yandex took place in several stages:

• CompTek;
• Arcadia;
• Yandex - search system;
• Yandex company.

CompTek

Although the search engine itself was announced on September 23, 1997, the history of its creation goes back to 1988. After graduating from the faculty applied computer science, Arkady Volozh is hired at the Institute of Control Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he is working on the ability to process large amounts of data. Here he meets American student Robert Stubblein, who is undergoing an internship at the same institute. The guy helps Arkady with his study in English. The result of their communication was the emergence of CompTek, a company specializing in the sale of personal computers.

Arcadia

In parallel with the development of the company, Volozh considered the possibility of creating a service that made it possible to search for information. To implement and develop their ideas, together with computer linguist Arkady Borkovsky, they created the Arcadia company in 1989. Four years later, Arcadia and CompTek merged. Shortly before this, they were joined by another one of the developers of the famous search engine, programmer Ilya Segalovich, a school friend of Arkady. It was he who became one of the “fathers” of the name of the future search engine.

Yandex - search engine

The evolution of Yandex started in 1995, when it was decided to create a program that searched for information on the Internet, but so far only on specific sites. At this time, Arkady Volozha created Yandex. What Yandex has become for us now was first seen on September 23, 1997 at the Moscow Softool exhibition. It was not the first such product of Russian origin, but thanks to its good adaptation to the peculiarities of the Russian language, it quickly won the favor of users. The future path of Yandex is a chain of modernizations aimed at optimizing its work, which naturally affected the attitude of users towards it.

Yandex company

The year 2000 is becoming a landmark year for the creators of Yandex. At this time, a company of the same name appears, the position of General Director of which is occupied by Arkady Volozh, and Ilya Segalovich becomes director of technology and development. In addition, Yandex now has such familiar applications as Yandex.Mail, Yandex.Postcards, Yandex.News, etc.

It took Yandex 10 years to become the most popular Russian Internet portal. Soon he has English version and the ability to search in Tatar and Ukrainian languages. Then Yandex acquires such convenient services like Yandex. Work, Yandex. Maps and Yandex. Traffic jams and some others.

Yandex owes its design to Artemy Lebedev Studio. Designers not only deal with the design of the search engine itself, but also develop appearance site, printing products companies. Probably, the most fruitful specialist of the Studio can be safely called Roman Voronezhsky, but everyone took part in the work on the design the best specialists studios. There was also cooperation with other companies. The first version of “Yandex.Toys” was designed by the company “Gorod-Info”; employees of “Bolotov.ru” worked on “Yandex.Toys”. Today, there is a definite tendency to attract designers from third-party companies.

History of the name Yandex

The word Yandex first appeared in 1993, as an application for searching information on a hard drive. There are four hypotheses regarding the origin of the name. The first assumption looks the most plausible. According to it, the word “yandex” is an abbreviation of the phrase “yet another indexer,” which translates as “yet another indexer.” Perhaps the name appeared as a result of replacing the first letter in the word “index” or comes from the phrase “language index”. The strangest is the version of Artemy Lebedev, who noticed the similarity with the word “Yandex”, in which “yang” symbolizes the masculine principle. After some time, in order to emphasize the domestic origin of the brand, it was decided to replace the first two letters with the consonant “I”, and later the name was completely Russified.

Now Yandex is a successful and dynamically developing company. The enormous work put into it by the creators paid off in spades and brought not only significant profits, but also recognition from users. Today Yandex is the best search engine on the Russian Internet.

Arkady Yurievich Volozh, currently the CEO of Yandex, was born on February 11, 1964 in the city of Guryev (now Atyrau), Kazakh SSR. In 1986, he graduated from the I.M. Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow with a degree in applied mathematics. Subsequently, Volozh worked at the Institute of Management Problems (IPU) of the USSR Academy of Sciences and conducted research on processing large amounts of information.

In 1988, Volozh founded CompTek and remained its CEO until 2000. The CompTek company still operates successfully in the Russian market, being a distributor software and equipment in the field of telecommunications.

In parallel with the management of CompTek, Volozh was writing a program that could search for information in large volumes of text. In 1989, together with Arkady Borkovsky, a specialist in computer linguistics, he founded the Arcadia company, which developed the information retrieval systems “Classification of Goods and Services” and “International Classification of Inventions.”

In 1993, Arcadia was merged with CompTek, and in the same year a program for searching information on a hard drive, called Yandex, was developed. In 1995, it was decided to use software development companies on the Internet, although the Yandex.ru search engine was officially announced only on September 23, 1997 at the Softool information technology exhibition.

The capabilities of the Yandex.ru search engine expanded as the Russian segment of the Internet grew. In 2000, the shareholders of CompTek founded the Yandex company, with Arkady Volozh becoming its CEO. Also in 2000, the following services were opened: Yandex.Mail, Yandex.Bookmarks, Yandex.News, Yandex.Products, Yandex.Guru, Yandex.Postcards and.

In 2009, the Yandex company launched the Snezhinsk search program, which is based on the Matrixnet method machine learning. This enabled users of 1,250 Russian cities to receive local search results. In 2010, Yandex's share in Runet search queries exceeded 60%, and on May 19, 2010, the company entered the international level by launching an English-language version of its search engine on the yandex.com domain. In the same year, one of the key services– Yandex.Maps, and in 2011 another service was launched – Yandex.Factory.

Arkady Volozh constantly combines management of Yandex (he owns 19.77% of shares with voting rights) with work in various fields related to information technology. In 1998 he headed the Committee wireless networks access Russian Association documentary telecommunications, also known as RANS.RU. In this position, Volozh took part in frequency deregulation wireless access and made a significant contribution to the legalization of IP telephony in our country.

Since 2007, Arkady Volozh has been the head of the Department of Data Analysis, based on the Yandex company, at the Faculty of Innovation and high technology Moscow University of Physics and Technology. In 2010, the Kommersant newspaper placed Volozh in first place in the ranking of top executives in the Media Business category.

Arkady Volozh is married and has three children.