Yandex has other names. Briefly about what the word "Yandex" means

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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. 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 created cooperative.

Since enterprises at that time did not have enough automated jobs, and the experience of the institute’s employees 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 common interests two young people were not limited to only foreign languages, and already in 1989 they jointly founded the company CompTek involved in sales computer equipment. So the company could specialize 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 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 Griboedov 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, 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. 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 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.

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 to find required document on CD, and Yandex.Lib- a package for developers who need search capabilities for your products.

A November 25, 1996 Yandex took its first timid step onto the Internet. Any person has the opportunity to perform convenient search Russian 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 All that is missing is a small step - 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. 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 queries 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.

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 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.

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. 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 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 " Subject Citation Index (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 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 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 something extraordinary happened an important event: 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 general director 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 beginning of a large-scale advertising campaign, for which the slogan “Everything will be found!” was coined, which is still used today. Second advertising company, 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 postal service, which has undergone further changes that have made it more convenient. These changes continued the following year: Yandex.Mail users received unlimited size mailbox and a new spam filter “Spam Defense”. 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 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 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.

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 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 needs 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 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, a program was launched that provides users search results, most suitable for a particular 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 new service- geo-advertising that 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 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.

You can read it online different versions origin of the name "Yandex". Thus, the most logical, but not entirely correct, is the opinion that the name of the Internet company “Yandex” was originally derived from the phrase “language index”. This version seems quite plausible in the light that the future founders of Yandex became the first programmers to write competitive software for searching documents in the language. By the way, the developments of CompTek (the progenitor of Yandex) are still used by leading Russian companies to this day.

The history of the creation of the name "Yandex"

The name “Yandex” itself originated within the walls of the CompTek company, where the first search algorithms were written, which served as the basis for the launch of the No. 1 search engine in Russia. The name “Yandex” was coined by the company’s founders Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh. In an attempt to find the most sonorous, memorable and concise name, parts of words from the English phrase yet another indexer were selected, which literally means “another indexer”. Indexer in search technologies is a program that “roams” the Internet and reads text information from website pages. Processed arrays of information are placed in an index - a database of pages already viewed and saved by the indexer program. Using search ranking algorithms, the user is given a link to the information he is interested in, based on search query, which he entered on the main page of the search engine or in the omnibox of his browser.

Initial use of the name "Yandex"

At the very beginning, the name "Yandex" was used for software product, allowing you to find information of interest on your computer’s hard drive. The technology was approximately the same as what a user sees when entering a query into the Windows search bar or when using various kinds of professional reference books purchased on disk. The ease of perception of the word “Yandex” by ear, its sonority and originality influenced the fact that on September 23, 1997, a new internet search engine Yandex, by the way, was not the only one in Russia at that time. In memory of the first developments in the field of search and the very birth of the search engine, the Yandex company annually holds the Yet Another Conference, the name of which is an allusion to the decoding of the company's name.

Yandex is the undisputed leader among other Internet resources in Russia. Now it is not just a search engine, but a whole system useful services. It enjoys enormous success outside its founding country. Yandex has conquered Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Its popularity is largely due to the presence of additional functions. This article will tell you about who invented Yandex and when this project was born.

Origins of creation

History of creation search engine begins long before the official launch. Whoever invented Yandex probably had no idea how famous this project would be. The roots of the idea go back to the eighties of the twentieth century. At that time, the Arcadia company was developing software, which specialized in information retrieval. The leaders of the project, that is, directly those who came up with Yandex, were two Arcadia programmers - Borkovsky and Volozh. This system I really liked the company CompTek, which represented the market of computers and components. This only gave additional impetus to the creators of the project. And now, even more confident in their abilities, they decided on the advisability of developing the system and releasing Yandex to the masses.

The photo below shows the Yandex team that worked on the search engine in the first years after the creation of the resource.

Modern interpretation

The same “Yandex” that everyone is so used to seeing was formed only in 1996. This year the site itself appeared.

The official presentation took place only a year later - in ninety-seven. At that time, Yandex was only a subsidiary of CompTek International. The search engine achieved recognition and independence only three years after the announcement.

Even at the time of the search engine’s presentation to the public, it supported the implementation of interesting functions:

issuance of documents corresponding to the request;
search for identical options and exclude one of them;
search according to word form, understanding and ability to distinguish words by morphological characteristics;
processing data within a paragraph, the developed algorithm takes into account the distance;
taking into account the number of keywords on the page;
paid attention to the arrangement of words and the spaces between them.

Name idea

Whoever came up with “Yandex” had an idea about the name of the system long before the long-awaited release of the search engine. According to legend, the word Yandex stands for “language index”. If you interpret the meaning from English, you get Yet another indexer - “another indexer (search engine).”

There is another version that talks about the appearance of just such a name. The first letter of the English word Index, if it sounded in the system’s native language, corresponds to the Russian I on the keyboard.

But in any case, the initiators of this particular name are the company’s director of technology and the system developer

Site interface

CompTek demonstrated its first search engine functions a year before official release. Then, back in 1996, the first Yandex products were presented at the Netcom’96 exhibition. These were "Yandex.Dict", that is, a dictionary, and "Yandex.Site". The latter provided the opportunity for site owners to inform the system about new and deleted pages, index and improve the presentation of the electronic resource in search results. The service is similar to today's Yandex.Webmaster.

This is what it looked like home page Yandex in 1998.

After the presented services, two more products were almost immediately developed - “Yandex.CD” and “Yandex.Lib”. The first one helped to search for the necessary CD ROM files. The second one is needed during installation various programs and databases.

The first design of the site was quite simple. Whoever invented Yandex was well aware of the design imperfections. However great effort were applied to the functional part rather than the aesthetic one. Responsible for this part work was Artemy Lebedev.

It was a good idea to organize a Yandex forum. The main purpose of its creation was to obtain new thoughts to improve the project, which was to be carried out through communication between users and developers. This option functioned perfectly until 2008. Afterwards the system was transformed, but this idea remained, only now it is on Yandex’s own blog. According to the developers, this was done in order to increase socialization.

The nineties

Since the one who invented the Yandex search engine understood its powerful potential, a decision was made to refine and improve the system. A year after the official presentation, the developers began working on the search engine. The results of the work were visible to users in the form of expanded functionality. These include filtered searches and similar documents.

Attention has also finally been paid to external design site. Users also appreciated the design improvements. But still with functional, technical side the changes were more significant.

In the first couple of years, the search engine rapidly gained popularity, and the number of users grew steadily. Since technological progress does not stand still, the company was constantly learning something new, which was reflected in the products it produced. For example, thanks to the introduction of a new search bot, the process itself has become faster. At the same time, the number of operations performed per unit of time increased.

For the average user, the noticeable improvements were as follows:

The ability to select search parameters to specify it and narrow the range of options. That is, now you can search for the necessary data by signatures, annotations, pictures and headings separately.
Entering restrictions on certain number electronic resources.
Files in Russian were allocated in a separate category.

At the same time, such a concept as thematic index citation, which indicates the authority of an electronic resource. Then this indicator depended on the number of sites linking to the analyzed domain.

The design of the site has become more modern, somewhat reminiscent of the current design.

In the same year, the developers introduced a website builder - "Narod.ru".

New millennium

It was with the beginning of the new millennium that the company was able to reach new level of its development. The system positioned its social orientation, so that it attracted even more users.

A further impetus for development was influenced by the decision of one of the creators of Yandex to active promotion this project. Now the company was looking for a partner and investor. It became the company ru-Net Holdings.

Since the new partner invested incredible amounts of money in Yandex, he also secured the right to change the staff. But this only benefited the project.

From that moment on, serious changes began in the company. The multifunctionality of the system began to be clearly expressed. This is clearly noticeable by the fact that new services appeared that were in no way related to search work. These include "News", "Bookmarks" and "Mail". Some of them were soon combined into the combined Yandex.Market application. The developers also ensured that the system is integrated with user browsers. This option is called "Yandex.Bar".

"Yandex money"

Who invented "Yandex.Money"? In 2001, the release of services not related to search continued. And the next project was Yandex.Money. On the advent of electronic payment system influenced by the fact that it was in 2001 that the project became the most successful among Russian users.

It also appeared additional option- "Yandex.Pictures". Thanks to constant expansion range of services offered, the amount of information stored on the company’s servers increased. At the time of 2001, this volume was one terabyte.

Work continued on the design of the search engine. Now the main page is full of icons for various services. Separately, links to news and new items were provided.

"Yandex.Direct" and "Photo"

This year has been a banner year for website and enterprise application developers. Surely all these people mentally thank the one who came up with Yandex.Direct. At that time, this service was very unfinished and had many shortcomings. For the most part it target audience there were advertisers, not web specialists.

For ordinary users, the appearance of another option became more noticeable. Whoever came up with Yandex.Photo probably didn’t expect such a success for the service.

Since in previous years the company was actively expanding its geography, it was not at all surprising that Yandex opened a representative office in Ukraine. There are now eleven offices around the world, each with a specific type of activity.

Creating a Browser

One of the most significant events in last years was the appearance of a proprietary browser from this company. The one who came up with Yandex.Browser was guided by the capabilities of another company, because the result should have been no worse. Competition is the engine of progress, so it is not surprising that, following Google, Yandex also released its product. But, unlike a competing company, the developers presented their browser in 2012 ( Google Chrome was announced in 2008). But this was also a mistake by the developers, since Google was not so popular in 2010, but by the time Yandex.Browser was released, it had completely consolidated its position. Moreover, the development of a competing company is taken as a basis, only supplemented with proprietary differences.

"Yandex.Transport"

In 2014, the company presented another project. Whoever invented Yandex.Transport wanted to make life easier modern man who is forced to constantly be on the move. The basis of the application is a map settlement, which indicates the movement of vehicles in real time. That is, a person standing at a bus stop can clearly determine how much longer he needs to wait for transport. The service is also equipped with an alarm clock that will tell you right moment exit from public transport.

The founder of the Yandex search engine, Arkady Volozh, as it turns out, is not its largest owner. They, according to the prospectus issued by Yandex the day before The IPO is Baring Vostok Capital Partners, which invested $5.28 million in the search engine in 2000.

The largest Russian Internet search engine will begin pre-marketing of its initial public offering with a listing on the American NASDAQ exchange early next week. Meetings between the organizing banks and investors will begin on May 3, reports Reuters. The organizers of the placement are Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Revealed the structure

Now this fund is the largest shareholder, its share is 22.6% (23.89% of voting shares), it reported in its prospectus for the IPO. Volozh’s economic share is 14.67% (19.77% of votes), as follows from the prospectus, Segalovich’s is 3.07% (4.14% of votes). The American fund Tiger Global has 20.5% of shares, and UFG has another 5.13% of shares, the document states. The prospectus names Ben Cole, John Boynton, Al Fenoti, Esther Dyson, Alexander Voloshin and Alexander Shulgin as minority shareholders. Former head of the presidential administration Voloshin is on the company's board of directors.

Until now, economic shares only affected the distribution of dividends. It began paying them in 2006, transferring $15 million to shareholders. In 2007, the company paid $10 million in dividends, in 2008 - $19.5 million, and in 2010 - $30 million. If it continues to pay dividends in the future , then holders of shares of classes A and B will receive them in proportion to the number of securities they hold, the prospectus says. However, the company has no such plans yet.

In the first quarter of 2011, revenue amounted to 3.9 billion rubles, profit - 820 million rubles. Almost all revenue came from advertising sales - 3.8 billion rubles. Of these, 3.47 billion rubles. Contextual advertising brought 328 million rubles. - media.

It is worth noting that foreign co-owners of the company may have difficulty increasing their share. Since 2008, Russia has had a law on foreign investment in strategic enterprises, which prohibits foreigners from owning more than 50% of the voting shares of such enterprises, the placement prospectus recalls.

This law does not say anything about Internet companies, but companies that own data encryption technologies automatically fall under its scope, and its 100% subsidiary, Yandex.Money, just recently acquired such a license, the prospectus says. does not rule out that on this basis the parent company may also be classified as a strategic enterprise. The decision on this matter is made by a government commission chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. His press secretary Dmitry Peskov is not aware of plans to include him in the list of strategic companies.

In November 2010, the IPO was conducted by the Internet holding Mail.ru Group of Yuri Milner and Alisher Usmanov. The company was placed at the upper end of the price range and was valued by investors at $5.7 billion. Previously, Usmanov had negotiated the purchase of a stake in, but they did not lead to a deal. Mail.ru Group shares on the LSE yesterday fell by 3.3% to $30.7 per share.

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It is difficult to imagine the modern Internet without special search engines, which are updated daily with millions of new Internet pages from all over the world, providing a certain group of pages, depending on their thematic content. Before the advent of searches, you had to write down specific page names and then type them into the browser each time. But everything is changing, and the Internet in particular. With the advent of the Yandex search engine, the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet gained access to the necessary information in Russian. But what does the word “Yandex” mean? In this article we're talking about just about this.

What is Yandex?

Yandex is a special search engine created back in 1997. At that time, there were practically no search engines, especially for the Russian-speaking segment. global network Internet. Previously, people had to find out from friends the addresses of pages on which lists of Internet sites were located, or by themselves semantic meaning enter some addresses in English. It is not a fact that this selection of addresses could have been successful.

Millions of Internet pages are created every day. Each of them contains content on a specific topic, for example, music. Now imagine that you are sitting at a computer, your browser is open, you know about the existence of such a page, but you can’t do anything more than randomly type in various addresses, and it’s not a fact that the desired result will be in Russian. As you know, today the Internet consists of 70% of sites where information is posted in English; at the time of 1997, this percentage was close to 100.

The creation of a Russian-language search engine was a kind of breakthrough for the entire CIS, which is why the popularity of Yandex continues to this day, although there are many other search engines in the world that are not inferior both in functionality and in the amount of information sought. But the question is, what does the word “Yandex” mean? Not every user knows it. In this article we will tell in detail about the history of this wonderful word that changed the Russian Internet.

What does the word “Yandex” mean and where does it come from?

Not many people know, but a search engine is a specific catalog of Internet pages, and not just a program that, when you click the “Search” button, scours the entire Internet for similarities between words in the search and on the site. It's not like that at all. When creating his own Internet page, a person can register it on some search engine, but he can also refuse this, which is why the site cannot be seen during a search; access to it will be carried out only by entering its address in the browser.

So, Yandex, like all other search engines, is a large catalog of sites, among which the search engine selects sites where the searched phrases are found. When translated into English, the catalog will be written as index. This word has many translations, but now we are talking about exactly one of them, because it is because of this word that the search engine is called that.

Initially, the creators wanted to call the search engine Yet another indexer, i.e., another directory. The name was too sarcastic, because at that time there were many search engines in English, but not one for Russian-speaking countries. Now you may already have an answer in your head to the question of why “Yandex” was called that. The above name was shortened to Yet another, but the creators still did not like this option, after which it was decided to make the abbreviation “YT” and only then convert it into just one Russian letter “Ya”, and then replace the first letter in the word “index” with it " This is how Yandex came about.

Main competitors

As already mentioned in the title about what the word “Yandex” means, a search engine is a special directory of sites that searches for answers to questions asked in its own catalog, but not in other search engines, although such solutions also exist. IN Lately This search engine has only one major competitor in the Russian-language segment - Mail.ru. Be that as it may, Yandex still remains the leader. If we take a global scale, then there are quite a lot of strong competitors, including Google, Yahoo and other well-known search engines.

Finally

We hope that this article helped you find the answer to what the word “Yandex” means, and you now know the history of the modern Internet a little better.

Also, do not forget that every creator of an Internet page can register it in Yandex. Absolutely free.