The official birthday of Yandex is September 23, 1997. On this day, CompTek presented the search engine at the Softool international forum taking place in Moscow. And already in March 2000, Yandex began its history as an independent company.
CompTek Firm
In 1988, a young mathematician Arkady Volozh worked at the Institute of Control Problems of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and at the same time studied in graduate school. The main focus of his work was research in the field of processing large amounts of data. At this time, the country was transitioning to a market economy. After the adoption of the law "On cooperation", the leadership of the institute received an order from the district committee of the CPSU "to form a cooperative."
So, voluntarily-compulsory. Volozh found himself at the head of a company that supplied personal computers from Austria. Now it is already difficult to imagine, but ordinary seeds were the main currency for paying for goods. However, Volozh was engaged in technical details and did not participate directly in trade. The purchased goods were used to create automated jobs. Business development led Arkady to the need to study English.
In search of a teacher, he met the American Robert Stubblebine. It soon became clear that their common interests were not limited to language learning. Stubblebine also planned to sell computers in Russia. After a while, the friends began to work together, organizing the Russian-American company CompTek.
How Arcadia appeared
Being engaged in commerce, Volozh did not leave work on data sets. And soon he had an idea to use the morphology of the language when searching for text. Another Arkady, Barkovsky, a specialist in computational linguistics, joined the work. Together with him, the Arcadia company was created, the first product of which was the classifier of inventions for the Institute of Patent Information. The company additionally hired several programmers who at first worked in the kitchen of Volozh's apartment.
Soon the program began to be recorded on floppy disks and sold as a boxed product. In the early 90s, the old economy collapsed. Many enterprises went bankrupt under the weight of the market. Arcadia's products have also ceased to be in demand. The CompTek company saved the situation - many new banks and financial institutions appeared in the country, which were snapping up PCs in huge quantities.
Work on search technologies ceased to be profitable, but despite this, Volozh did not want to give up his project. It was decided that a thriving computer firm could easily afford the maintenance of a dozen programmers. Arcadia became a part of CompTek as a separate programming department. The first major work of the newly minted department was the digital edition of the Bible. This was followed by an order for a complete academic edition of Griboyedov, and a little later, of Pushkin.
Creation of Yandex
Arkady Volozh's classmate, programmer Ilya Segalovich, has also joined the work on Yandex. The search technology had not yet been developed, and the response time was rather long. Segalovich took upon himself a huge amount of work in morphology and linguistics, having spent a lot of effort on the search part. In 1995, the company first connected to the Internet, and a year later Yandex was prepared to work on the Internet. By 1997, the search engine had indexed almost the entire Runet.
The name Yandex was invented by Ilya Segalovich, and it comes from the English Yet Another indexer - "Language index". By the time of the official release, Yandex was already able to use morphology when searching, evaluate documents by relevance, find copies, search for words within a paragraph, and much more. The first site design, very simple and laconic, was developed by Artemy Lebedev, widely known today.
Work on the project continued. Soon, additional opportunities for users appeared - search by pictures, titles, annotations. Search results in Russian began to be highlighted separately. A year later, the Narod.ru website constructor appeared.
Since that time, Arkady Volozh has completely switched to work on promoting Yandex. Further development required investments and partners with experience in corporate building. In the spring of 2000, an agreement was signed with ru-Net Holdings, according to which 1/3 of the search engine was transferred to it. Yandex separated from CompTek and became an independent company with its own budget and personnel, headed by Volozh himself.
Since 2002, the project has become fully self-sustaining. Many additional services have appeared in Yandex that are not directly related to search - news, mail, postcards, market and others. The history of the modern portal Yandex began, which ranks first in the Russian Internet in terms of audience coverage and popularity.
