Who owns the Yandex search engine. History of the Yandex company
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 the global network in Russia was only talked about in the bowels 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 Management Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he researched the possibility of processing large amounts of data, and the leadership of the 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 only to foreign languages, and already in 1989 they jointly founded the company CompTek, which sold computer equipment. So the company could have specialized only in hardware if not for Volozh’s old connections.
Teach the 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 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 this moment there was a man, who was able to help cope with this difficult 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 under the leadership of Yuri Apresyan provided a high-quality dictionary, and Ilya Segalovich and a group of programmers began to integrate it into 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, 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 a new decoding 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 he worked as follows. If during the search process an unfamiliar word comes across, the algorithm analyzes it and predicts the inflection paradigm using an existing dictionary, just as native speakers, having once heard a new term, can use it in various forms.
Then, in 1996, the developers realized that the new technology could be developed and sold independently, 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, a search engine designed for installation on Internet sites. The first solution over time became not very popular, and 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. This was Yandex.CD, which helps to find the required document on a CD, and Yandex.Lib - a package for developers who need search capabilities for your products.
And on November 25, 1996, Yandex took its first timid step onto the Internet. Anyone has the opportunity to perform a convenient search for Russian-language text using 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 - indexing Russian-language resources with your 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 summaries were posted 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 a personal page. Soon the companies divided their areas of interest, and Molotok.Ru came under the full control of netBridge, and Narod.Ru became the property of Yandex. The changes that occurred in 1999 finally secured the status of a social service for Yandex and predetermined 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 predetermined the further history of its development, which required additional resources and assumed a management model that was completely different from that used at CompTek. Since 1999, Arkady Volozh, having chosen the promotion of Yandex as his main occupation, began choosing from many potential partners. It was necessary to find people experienced in corporate construction who would not require a complete transfer of management and would be willing 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 start of a large-scale advertising campaign, for which the slogan “Everything will be found!” was invented, 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 into a single text of the appeal. 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 Much attention was paid to the postal service, which underwent further changes that 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 was added PPT formats and XLS, 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 a new line was presented, which included three solutions: Yandex.Server, which grew out of Yandex.Site, Yandex.Publisher, including Yandex.CD, and Yandex.SDK, which became 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 the 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: the Russian company had 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 foreign Internet space. In 2007, the Ukrainian version of the yandex.ua search was opened, 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 search results, most suitable for a particular 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 of local services for Ukraine grew 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 a new service - geo-advertising, which offered 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.
All our activities are a struggle against entropy.
This process, of course, is endless.
Arkady Volozh.
Today Yandex offers users not just a search, but a whole range of useful . Among the many resources, Yandex ranks first in Russia in terms of traffic. Websites have been opened for users from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, which are also popular with residents of these countries because they contain many additional services.
Nowadays, numerous services available on Yandex allow, and. In addition to searching the Internet for texts, videos and pictures, users are offered product searches and price comparisons, mail, weather forecasts, TV and transport schedules, tools for webmasters, corporate solutions, developed and a host of other useful projects. Yandex is often looked up to as the flagship of Russian Internet technologies, which is not without reason: it is under this brand that new search technologies have already seen the light of day, and many incredible ideas are constantly being implemented.
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 the Global Network in Russia was talked about only in the bowels of scientific research institutes.
Background: voluntary-obligatory cooperative
It was 1988. At that time, he had just completed his studies as a mathematician and programmer. Arkady Volozh worked at the Institute of Management Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he researched the possibility of processing large amounts of data, and the leadership of the Soviet Union tried to put the country on the feet of a market economy. They began to implement the adopted Law on 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 created cooperative.
Since enterprises at that time did not have enough automated jobs, 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 who had come for guard duty. Robert Stubblebine, from whom I took English lessons. But the common interests of the two young people were not limited only to foreign languages, and already in 1989 they jointly founded the company CompTek, engaged in sales of computer equipment. So the company could have specialized only in hardware if not for Volozh’s old connections.
Teach the 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 to the idea that it was necessary to somehow take into account the rich inflection inherent in the Russian language. And at that moment a person was found who was able to help cope with this difficult task. He became Arkady Borkovsky, who studied problems of computational 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 Volozh’s friend from 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 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 became much 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 - with the academic publication of Pushkin and Griboyedov for the Institute of World Literature.
Yet another indexer
When it became clear in 1993 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 took a different path. At that time, many new programs for UNIX-like systems, due to the lack of desire to come up with an original name, were simply called by adding the combination “yet another” to any word, meaning “yet another”. 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. And so it appeared Yandex.
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 a new decoding with the division of the Internet in the spirit of Eastern philosophy into INDEX and YANDEX. But these two interpretations appeared much later, after the release of Yandex. 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 strict binding to the dictionary that was available in the program. And he worked as follows. If during the search process an unfamiliar word comes across, the algorithm analyzes it and predicts the inflection paradigm using an existing dictionary, just as native speakers, having once heard a new term, can use it in various forms.
Then, in 1996, the developers realized that the new technology could be developed and sold independently, without being tied to specific texts. This idea was a very timely solution, since many companies needed similar search systems, 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.
C ompTek took part in the Netcom"96 exhibition, where it presented two new products: Yandex.Dict, which was a layer between, who did not understand Russian morphology, and the user, and Yandex.Site- a search engine designed for installation on Internet sites. Over time, the first solution became not very popular, and Yandex.Site, which turned into Yandex.Server, and 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 the document you need on the CD, and Yandex.Lib- a package for developers who need search capabilities for their products.
A November 25, 1996 Yandex took its first timid step onto the Internet. Anyone has the opportunity to perform a convenient search for 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 - indexing Russian-language resources with your 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 the solution in a favorable light Yandex.Web from CompTek, which can find everything on the Internet. Resource yandex.ru 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 the original “slanted” design was created by Artemy Lebedev (his studio is still working on the appearance of Yandex services) And a CompTek employee kept in touch with users Elena Kolmanovskaya, which took on the burden of establishing dialogue with the public.
Work for the people
Then it turned out that the new service had outgrown the scope of a simple demonstration of the capabilities of Yandex technology. Regular users began to use it, 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 queries made using logical operators, but also ordinary sequences made up of several words. In addition to this, the new search engine was able to recognize the uniqueness of a document, showing only one copy in the results, and had its own relevance assessment algorithm, which made it possible to obtain among the first links the resources most relevant to the search query.
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 the Russian version.
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 at the 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.
The year 1999 can be called the year of the development of the Internet. Then the amount of information and users increased by an order of magnitude, and meanwhile Yandex came in fourth or fifth place in popularity. To better index the sharply increased volume of data, a new robot has been launched. It was created with the aim of effectively filtering spam, and also indexed image captions, descriptions and took into account 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 summaries were posted 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. The new mechanism, called " Thematic index citations (TIC)", from now on, organized resources by importance and popularity, and search in categories made it possible to find information only among sites on a certain topic. " Family search”, designed to prevent pages with obscene or erotic content from appearing in the results.
1 December 5, 1999 Yandex and netBridge opened Molotok.Ru. This was followed by a joint project, which started on February 15, 2000. Coming out under the motto “Build your website in 60 seconds!”, it provided anyone with the opportunity to have a personal page. Soon the companies divided their areas of interest, and Molotok.Ru came under the full control of netBridge, and Narod.Ru became the property of Yandex. The changes that occurred in 1999 finally secured Yandex’s status as a social service and predetermined its 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 predetermined the further history of its development, which required additional resources and assumed a management model that was radically different from that used at CompTek. Since 1999, Arkady Volozh, having chosen the promotion of Yandex as his main occupation, began to select from many potential partners. It was necessary to find people experienced in corporate construction who would not require a complete transfer of management and would be willing 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.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. The toolbar was released in the fall Yandex.Bar. Also, 2000 was the year of the start of a large-scale advertising campaign, for which the slogan “Everything will be found!” was invented, 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.”
Yandex celebrated New Year 2001 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 into a single text of the appeal. 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 it was established Russian Open Internet Search Cup, also called the Yandex Cup. 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 ability to search for images using Yandex.Images, and in the summer together with a group of companies PayCash was launched. 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 also affected Yandex.Mail. At the end of 2002, three independent services, Pick Up, Guru and Products, were merged into Yandex Market, a project that is still 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 , 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, much attention was paid to the postal service, which underwent further changes that 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, anyone could take part in a two-week test of the new look of the main page and 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 a new line was presented, which included three solutions: Yandex.Server, which grew out of Yandex.Site, Yandex.Publisher, including Yandex.CD, and Yandex.SDK, which became 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.
Meanwhile, international players appeared on the Russian search engine market. 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 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. Opened for users Yandex maps, subsequently closely connected with many other services and becoming one of the priority areas. Earned Yandex.WiFi, saw the light Yandex.Afisha and other projects, the hallmark of many of which was their focus on the needs of Russian users. It has become a tradition to hold regional seminars. This approach was correct: the Russian company had undeniable advantages over 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 foreign Internet space. In 2007, the Ukrainian version of the yandex.ua search was opened, 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 program was launched to provide users with search results that are most relevant to a specific city when required. On the other hand, in the same year, Yandex became closely involved in foreign content: testing began on a service that provides translation of found foreign sites, which was released already 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 of local services for Ukraine grew and a regional search appeared, called “Poltava”. It was based on technology Matrixnet, applied 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 2011, which became another milestone in the development of the company.
At the very beginning of the year, advertisers were offered a new service - geo-advertising, which suggests highlighting organizations on maps and displaying such maps in search results. 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 surpassing only , which earned $1.67 billion in 2004. From this moment begins a new page in the history of Yandex, which has grown from an ambitious project into a huge company, while successfully preserving the unique style loved by millions of users.
Hello friends. This is our everything - search engines. Just twenty years ago, the phrases “Google”, “Google can help you” or “search in Yandex” could puzzle any person, but now even small children understand them. Here is the story of the creation of Yandex and Google, the most popular search engines that make our lives easier every day and bring billions to their creators.
The history of Google
Google first appeared in America, namely on the territory of Stanford University, where its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met. Their meeting was completely accidental. Larry, along with other students, simply came on an excursion to Stanford University, and his guide turned out to be Sergey Brin. They both had Jewish roots, but unlike Larry, who was Native American, Sergei was from Russia. He moved to America when he was still a schoolboy. Later, a chance meeting and the ensuing conversation grew into a strong friendship.
The idea of creating a good search system came to the guys about a year after they met, when two young graduate students decided to surprise their teachers. They created a search engine called "PageRank". People quickly fell in love with it, surprising them with its quality of information search. It became much easier to find it; in other search engines, the first links to appear were those that contained more keywords, that is, the search for information was carried out by the number of similar words in the text, but the meaning was very lame. When creating his search engine, Larry took the works of scientists as a model. The scheme was as follows - the better the robot, the more people referred to this scientist. The search engine worked the same way: the better the information, the higher it rose among the links.
Why is Google Google?
In order for the system to work, all that remains is to choose a name. It had to be short and interesting. The creators considered more than fifty names, but after careful selection, Brin and Page finally settled on the term “googol,” which means one to the hundredth power. Thus, already in 1997, students and teachers at Stanford University were able to evaluate all the advantages and disadvantages of the new creation.
Design
Many users fell in love with the search engine precisely because of the simplicity of its design. As it turned out, colored letters on a white background were not the original idea of brilliant programmers. That was all Larry and Sergey had enough money for, let alone hiring designers. They, as they say, did everything “simple and tastefully.”
Heyday
1998 was a turning point in the development of Google. That's when the company was registered Google Inc, the first office was rented (in fact, it was an ordinary garage), the first employees were hired and the first check was received from the investor - millionaire Andy Bechtolshteim for 100 thousand dollars. And then Google moves from office to office, signs a contract with another major American corporation, conquers Sydney and South America and acquires Blogger's US publishing service. The second most important year was 2004, when the stock market saw shares of a successful company for the first time, and its founders became billionaires.
Development
Every year, Google is actively developing and coming up with new services and developments. So, the most popular today are Google+ is a social network that was created not so long ago in 2011 so that people could communicate via the Internet.
- Google Docs is a service in which you can store text documents, various presentations and tables.
- Google Drive is a service for storing private information. Each person can store up to 15GB of information and access it from anywhere in the world.
- Gmail – email.
- Maps – geographical maps. They are convenient because you can calculate the route based on mileage and time.
- Play is a gaming application store.
- Picasa is a service for working with applications.
- News – a collection of news from around the world. They are formed from publication titles and are displayed depending on the user's preferences.
- Google has also created its own personal Google browser Chrome, which is one of the most convenient and frequently used browsers in the world today.
History of the creation of Yandex
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Arkady Volozh - founder of Yandex
Yandex appeared in Russia on September 23, 1997. One of its founders was Russian programmer Arkady Volozh. He wanted to create a system that would be able to find information in large volumes, and, importantly, would take into account the morphology of the language. But this was still a long way off, and Volozh, together with his English teacher, in 1989 created the company CompTek, which sold computers. In the same year, Arkady persistently continued to achieve his goal, therefore, together with another friend Arkady Borkovsky, he created the Arcadia company for the development of search and information systems. In 1993 the two companies merged. At the same time, a program was created to search on a computer’s hard drive.
The mystery of the name
The program needed to be called something, but a suitable name could not be found. We also considered the option of the name “Search”, but since we wanted to show that the system was developed in Russia, it was necessary to introduce an element of the Russian language, and the word search was not understandable to Russian people. The word “Yandex” was suggested by Volozh’s school friend Ilya Segalovich, who later became director of technology. He thought that the word “index” was more in harmony with the Russian language, but since the system was not the first in Russia, the phrase “yet another index” (another indexer) came to his mind. As a result, “Yandex” appeared, and it was decided to replace the first “Ya” with the Russian “Ya”.
Development
In the same year, 1993, the first search dictionary was created, which, as Volozh wanted, took into account the morphology of the Russian language. And the very next year the “Bible Computer Reference Book” was created.
In 1995, they decided to launch the search system on the Internet, but initially it worked only with selected resources, and later with all Russian-speaking ones. The turning point and official birthday of Yandex is September 23, 1997, when search system was exhibited for the first time at the Softool exhibition.
At the time when Yandex appeared on the Internet, it was not the only search engine. Many preferred the same Rambler or Altavista, which was the most popular search engine in Russia at that time. But Yandex was rapidly gaining momentum, and by mid-1999, Yandex brought the owners about 72 thousand dollars. In 2000, the RuNetHolding company invested good money in Yandex, but still had to sell some of the shares. It was then that Yandex became a separate company, with its own structure, budget and management. General Director Arkady Volozh became Yandex company.
In the same year, Yandex expanded its capabilities: Yandex bookmarks, Yandex.mail, and Postcards appeared. The company's staff has also increased. Another significant advance was the emergence of Yandex Bar - specialized software.
All this influenced the fact that already next year Yandex became number one in terms of traffic on the Runet. Yandex continued to develop. Yandex Pictures and Yandex Money appeared. With each subsequent year, Yandex only actively developed and expanded its staff.
Design
Initially, Yandex's design was as simple as Google's. On the main page the name of the search engine was written, as well as examples of queries and a couple of hot news. The design was finalized in several stages. So the second stage was in 1999. Then the design of the Yandex home page had already become close and even similar to the real one. The categories were improved, and windows with mail, advertising, forums, etc. appeared. In 2001, the Yandex main page was improved and was already approaching today's version. The final version of the changes to the main page was the 2003 version, after which the design did not change radically, but was only refined in places.
Thus, Google and Yandex have gone through a short, but very actively developing path of formation. None of the search engines today stands still and every day they develop more and more new services to make life easier. These are the world's leading search engines, processing millions of queries every day. Many people can no longer imagine their lives without these lifesavers - they have become such commonplace things.
Which search engine do you prefer? What do you usually do - Google or type into Yandex? Pavel Yamb was with you, see you soon
The Yandex search system was introduced to the public in September 1997. More than 20 years have passed since its announcement. During this time, a whole generation of people appeared who grew up in close contact with this search engine.
What has changed during the existence of this search engine in the Internet world, and how did it enter the life of the population of an entire country?
History of origin
Yandex owes its birth to a group of talented programmers who, back in 1993, set themselves the goal of creating a search engine that would find necessary files on the computer's hard drive. The core of this group was Arkady Volozh, who wanted this system to take into account the morphology of the language in its work.
To do this, together with his friends, Volozh opens a software company and calls it “Arcadia”. These programmers were the ones who invented Yandex. That's when the search program came into being.
What does the name mean
The choice of name for the search engine gave rise to much debate. At first they wanted to call the system Search, which means “search”. But patriotic feelings prevailed, and the owners of Yandex decided that since the program was created for Russia, the name should be in harmony with the Russian language. The name we know now was suggested by a friend of the founder, Ilya Segalovich, who became one of the co-owners of the Internet enterprise.
After consulting, the founding fathers came to the conclusion that the word “index” is better known to the Russian-speaking population. Therefore, we took it as a basis. And since Russia already had similar programs, they decided to add “yet another,” which means “one more.” By combining all three words together, they got “yandex”.
How Yandex became the most popular search engine in Russia
At the time of the launch of Yandex, Russia already had search engines. For example, at the turn of the 2000s popular search on the Internet there were Rambler and Aport. However, after 2 years of operation, the new search system took a strong position and earned 72 thousand dollars for the owners of Yandex.
Gradually, the new search engine expanded its service scope, creating Post service, own software. Expansion occurred not only through “white” methods. For example, when installing software downloaded from the Internet, many people pay attention to the fact that the service’s programs are installed at the same time: its browser, Yandex bar, music extension, Yandex search. These applications appear on users' computers like mushrooms after rain, subtly inviting them to use them.
In 2017, in terms of the number of users in Russia, this search engine surpassed all similar services, including Google. This is not surprising, considering great amount services offered by the owners of Yandex.
Who is the true owner of the company
Despite positioning itself as Russian company, "Yandex" is a joint-stock company, the authorized capital of which is owned by the joint-stock company Yandex N.V. registered in Holland.
The block of shares among shareholders was distributed as follows:
- Arkady Volozh - 10.5%;
- heirs of Ilya Segalovich, who died in 2013, - 2.5%;
- directors and employees of Yandex - 6.8%;
- Baring Vostok - 9.9%;
- Pre-IPO shareholders - 3.3%;
- public shareholders - 67%.
It turns out that the bulk of the shares belong to global capital and the owners of Yandex, with the exception of a small proportion of directors, are global bankers.
What services does Yandex provide?
Yandex has long outgrown just a search engine. Today it provides many services that satisfy the different needs of Internet users:
- Mail. Provides free of charge post services.
- Weather. The service automatically tracks the location of the user's computer and provides weather data.
- Market. Very useful service giving various information about products: prices in various stores, characteristics, as well as customer reviews.
- Money. Find out the owner of the Yandex. account. Money” the state of his electronic wallet is now not difficult. Account management is intuitive and can be done from any device.
- Disk. Cloud storage for user files. You can not only save data on it, but also use it as a file hosting service.
- Cards. They will help you build the shortest route when planning your trip, and will also provide information about the geographical location. Using Yandex maps, you can find out about the nearest restaurants, gas station or post office.
The number of services provided by the company is constantly increasing, and any user will find something interesting and useful for themselves.
Postal service
One of the very first services launched by Yandex was mail application. 20 years later it remains just as in demand. This service combines convenience and ease of use. For comfortable work it has many settings:
- In the “security” section you can monitor unauthorized visits from unknown IP addresses. It is possible to easily change the password, and there is a log of visits.
- In the “Collect mail from other addresses” section, you can combine several mailboxes. Letters will be collected from different postal services.
- Setting a ban on receiving letters from certain addresses occurs in the “Mail processing rules” section. You can also configure automatic memorization of new recipients here.
- In the design section you can set any theme for the mail interface.
- Display of the RSS feed is configured in the subscription section.
The Yandex. service is undeniably convenient. Mail". The owner can find out about the status of his money account, view the organizer with upcoming events, or download a file from the cloud directly from personal account, is now quite simple, using such a service.
Internet browser
Yandex did not ignore programs for surfing the Internet. It integrated its services into the shell Chrome browser and the result is a worthy product that has the following advantages:
- Ad blocking. Website owners who abuse advertising turn their Internet resources into a trash heap. It is precisely as garbage that interferes with the study of content that the user regards unnecessary advertisements. The browser's built-in blocker will make browsing sites easier.
- Enhanced security. The browser has a built-in antivirus that monitors changes to important program components. He also monitors files saved on the computer and monitors the safety of personal data. Protects against penetration spyware.
- At slow connection the program includes Turbo mode. In this case, the content is compressed on Yandex servers and then transferred to the user’s computer, saving traffic.
- Can synchronize with mobile devices browsing history data, passwords, bookmarks.
In addition, the Internet browser has built-in options that can only be installed as extensions on browsers from other manufacturers. For example, a contextual translator, hints explaining the meaning of words, a currency converter.
Payment system
The company currently issues its own plastic cards. The plastic number is linked to the owner’s Yandex wallet. Money". You can find out your account status using your card number using a computer and mobile applications.
In 2002, Yandex opened its own payment system. Through service electronic wallets, it makes it possible to do financial operations:
- payment for purchases in online stores;
- payment of fines and housing and communal services;
- transfers to plastic cards;
- refill mobile phone;
- receiving remuneration for work performed;
- withdrawal of funds through the ATM system.
The owner of the Yandex. wallet Money" can carry out transactions not only through a computer, but also through ATMs. This is achieved by the fact that the payment system works with large Russian banks.
Is it possible to find out the owner using a Yandex wallet?
People use the World Wide Web not only to search for information, but also to earn money. In this regard, scammers of all stripes use digital technologies to fool the population.
Anyone can open an anonymous Yandex wallet. Money". The owner of such a wallet is not required to provide passport information about himself. It is this loophole that attracts criminals. Often, for fraudulent schemes, such accounts are opened, money is collected and cashed out, after which the accounts are liquidated.
How to find out the owner of a Yandex wallet. Money"? The answer is no. Therefore, when transferring money to an unfamiliar account, you need to protect yourself as follows:
- Do not transfer money to anonymous accounts of unknown people.
- Transfer money only to registered and identified wallets. If force majeure occurs, you can contact support with a description of the situation. It is much easier to find the identified owner of a Yandex wallet by number. He is registered in the system and his details are fully verified.
It is advisable to make financial transactions on trustworthy sites or in systems that ensure the security of transactions.
Order a taxi online
Residents of large cities noticed the appearance of taxi cars with a large inscription “Yandex”. Every month, an online taxi ordering service appears in a new city, expanding its geography. At the beginning of 2018, this service operated in 126 cities in Russia, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and Ukraine.
The service operates through a mobile application, or an order can be made on the official website. After this, the information is sent to drivers who are closest to the client. Thus, the time spent waiting for a taxi is reduced to a minimum.
Cars operating under this program are divided into 3 categories: economy, comfort and business. The difference will be in the class of cars and the cost of the trip.
Any driver who has a car under 5 years old can become a partner of this program and earn money by providing taxi services.
How to become a partner
To a driver who decides to become a Yandex. Taxi" has several requirements:
- Official registration IP.
- Timely vehicle inspection.
- Obtaining a license for passenger transportation.
- Passing an exam on knowledge of the city in which he will work.
- Driving experience of at least 3 years.
In addition, the driver must have a neat appearance, follow the rules of etiquette and be polite to the client. The quality of service is monitored by the company through a mobile application, in which the client leaves feedback after the trip.
The advantage of working under this program is that you can quickly find a suitable client and there is no competition between drivers. Information about the order is sent to a smartphone connected to the Internet. For its mediation, the service collects from the owner of Yandex. Taxi" from 11 to 20% of the order cost.
In 1997, indexing the entire Russian Internet fit on 3 hard drives with a total capacity of 3 GB. At that time, Runet consisted of 5,000 sites.
At the time of its founding, the company consisted of 10 people who are still working today, with the exception of Ilya Segalovich, who died in 2013 at the age of 48.
In 2009, the Russian government, considering that Yandex was a strategic media outlet, obliged the company to sell golden share» Sberbank of Russia. This promotion allows you to introduce a ban on the sale of 25% of assets. Despite this, in 2011 the company's shares were sold on the American NASDAQ exchange in the amount of 16%. Then in 2014, the Oppenheimer fund bought shares, for which V.V. Putin publicly reproached the management.
Company achievements
In 2017, the share price reached its highest level in the entire history of trading on the stock exchange.
The lion's share of the company's earnings comes from Yandex. Direct." This area is associated with the provision of advertising services to business representatives. In the form of contextual advertising, Yandex places advertisements on sites registered in the YAN system.
In 2017, the Russian President paid a visit to the central office. He was presented with the company's developments: an unmanned vehicle, new search algorithms, and the work of a voice assistant.
In 2018, the company posted a video of its new development unmanned vehicle.
The car drove along the Moscow-Kazan highway, covering more than 700 km in 11 hours. The driver controlled the actions of the drone, but no intervention was required in the operation of the car.