What does the word Yandex mean and where does it come from? Yandex - what is Yandex and why is it called Yandex
In addition, it is a worthy competitor to similar companies on the world stage. Few people know that the history of the creation of Yandex began almost thirty years ago with a floppy disk, on which the future giant was located at that time.
Where it all started
It is difficult to imagine that the history of the creation of the Yandex search engine begins in the distant eighties of the last century. It was in 1988 that the author of the project had the idea to create a program that would take into account the complexities of the Russian language. And a year later such a search engine appeared. The company developing this program was called Arcadia.
Initially, the search algorithms developed in it were focused on patent science. Floppy disks with these programs were successfully sold to various research institutes. However, quite quickly this direction became unclaimed. And the creators of the algorithms decided to make their program more ambitious.
From physics student to dream company
Speaking about the history of the creation of Yandex, we should briefly talk about its authors. The idea of creating an extensive search database belongs to Arkady Yurievich Volozh. He was born in Kazakhstan and showed an interest in mathematical sciences from early childhood. Therefore, he studied at a special school with a physics and mathematics focus, and after that he headed to Moscow to enroll in physics and mathematics at Moscow State University. But Volozh failed the exams and received a higher education at the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas. After graduation, he devoted his professional activities to studying the problems of processing large amounts of information.
And then the era of cooperation began in the country... Then Volozh, on the instructions of his superiors, became a co-founder of a cooperative that engaged in a very unique barter with Austria: a carload of sunflower seeds was exchanged for a carload of personal computers. At the same time, Volozh studied English, and the American Robert Stubblebine helped him in this. Together with him, Arkady Yuryevich created the company CompTek, which sold personal computers.
Search & linguistics
In the history of the creation of Yandex, the Arcadia company became a kind of testing ground for studying and improving the search engine. It was founded by Arkady Volozh together with his namesake, Arkady Borkovsky. Borkovsky worked in computational linguistics and was one of the best specialists in this field. He worked at the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences and managed to create a unique translator program “Gin” at that time. The linguist’s achievements also include the creation of a service that checks spelling in the Lexicon. Borkovsky's knowledge and experience proved indispensable in creating a search program capable of adapting to the morphology of the Russian language.
"Search? This is nonsense!”
In 1990, a new stage began in the history of the creation of the Yandex search engine. Ilya Segalovich came to Arcadia company. Arkady Volozh knew him since childhood. The fact is that they sat at the same desk during classes at the physics and mathematics school. Afterwards they both tried to enter Moscow State University and both failed the exams. Segalovich came to replace Arkady Borkovsky, who after the fall of the Iron Curtain moved to live in America.
It should be noted that Ilya Valentinovich did not believe in what Volozh was doing. He just needed a job. Having learned what Arcadia was doing, he called his future work nonsense. At the Fedorovsky All-Russian Research Institute of Mineral Raw Materials, where Ilya Valentinovich previously worked, he was involved in the development of complex geophysical programs. Therefore, the creation of search algorithms seemed to him to be of little importance and futile. However, he quickly became charged with Volozh's enthusiasm and zeal.
At first, Ilya Valentinovich was a full-time employee of the Arcadia company, but soon began to work as a developer of search algorithms. It was these developments that marked the beginning of the history of the creation of Yandex.
CompTek
Due to the development of the IT technology market, indexing of patents, which Arcadia was engaged in, became unclaimed. Employees continued to develop search programs, but this activity did not generate income. Arkady Volozh, being the head of both Arcadia and the CompTek company, which sold and installed personal computers and software, did not want to leave data indexing. For this reason, it was decided to make Arcadia one of the departments of CompTek.
An important achievement that aroused interest in relevant circles was the digitization of the Bible. It was a huge amount of work; programmers typed most of the text by hand. Thus, a search program focused on the diversity of the Russian language has made itself known. This helped give impetus to development and attracted new clients. This also became an important event in the history of the creation of the Yandex search engine.
First steps
He became the main developer of Yandex. When he started working on the search engine, he encountered many difficulties. The waiting time for a response was very long, and the system for recognizing morphological features was underdeveloped. Linguists from the Institute for Information Transmission Problems helped significantly in improving the program. This is how the history of the creation of Yandex began.
The second step towards the development of the search engine was the connection to the Internet in 1995. This helped determine the direction of activity and set the main tasks in working on the program. If initially it was focused on searching for information in certain blocks and frames, now it was necessary to organize a search on the World Wide Web.
A year later, the first version was ready. You need to figure out what year Yandex appeared. Officially, the search engine's birthday is September 23, 1997. On this day, Yandex.ru was presented at the Softool exhibition. However, almost a year before this event, at the Netcom exhibition, CompTek demonstrated the Yandex.Site and Yandex.Dict programs.
How did Yandex become Yandex?
Ilya Segalovich called his development “Yandex”. When this search engine appeared, it was popular among programmers to name their creations using the prefix “yet another” (yet another). The search engine authors also used this technique. The full name of the product sounded like “yet another indexer” (another indexer). Short form - Yandex.
Arkady Volozh suggested replacing the first letters “ya” with the Russian “ya”, emphasizing that the program is Russian and is focused on searching for Russian words. In 2008, the company logo changed. At the same time, the name of the product began to be written in Russian.
This story of the creation of the name “Yandex” is the only true one. Besides this, there are several other versions. Some associate the name of the program with the Chinese symbol of masculinity (Yandex).
It should be noted that the search engine today could have a completely different name. The program has been put up for sale several times. However, no buyer was found, and Arkady Volozh decided to launch the search on his own.
Yandex LLC
In the history of the creation of Yandex, a turning point came in 1997. The search engine made itself known and aroused interest among investors. In the fourth version of Internet Explorer, Yandex was installed as the default search engine. Investments stimulated the development of the program. The search engine could automatically exclude duplicate documents from the results and sort them by relevance. Yandex has also learned how to perform complex multi-word queries.
But that was only the beginning. In 1999, Arkady Volozh actively began promoting the search engine and attracting investments for further development. The difficulty was that Volozh did not want to lose control over Yandex. This undoubtedly affected the desire of investors to invest money in the project.
The history of the creation of the Yandex company begins in 2000. At that time, CompTek was no longer generating the same income as at the beginning; the company was becoming obsolete. The search engine, on the contrary, developed and gained popularity. Therefore, Volozh decided to focus on working on the search. Huge investments were received from RuNetHoldings, in exchange the company received about a third of Yandex.
Development
In 2000, the Yandex company received tremendous development. This was greatly facilitated by investments from RuNetHoldings. They amounted to more than five million dollars. The company's staff was significantly expanded, the design was updated, and new services were created. Also, a large-scale advertising campaign was organized to promote the company on the market. It was then that the famous slogan appeared: “Yandex - everything can be found.”
2001 became a key year in the development of the portal. It has become a leader in the search market. When Yandex appeared, several similar sites already existed in Russia. And after a relatively short period of time, Volozh’s search engine overtook them all in terms of the number of users and the number of indexed documents. In 2002, the company's audience accounted for more than fifty-four percent of the total number of users.
First profit
Yandex LLC's revenues were supposed to be higher than expenses by 2004. However, this happened much earlier, in 2002. And in 2003, income was approximately two hundred thousand dollars against one hundred and fifty thousand spent on development and support. The value of the company, according to various estimates, ranged from fifteen to thirty million dollars.
In addition, in 2003, Yandex became the first among other Internet companies to begin paying dividends. Revenue growth was facilitated by the new Yandex.Money service and the appearance of contextual advertising on the portal.
“We work for Leo Tolstoy”
Despite the scale achieved, in 2002 the staff numbered about twenty people. The company occupied a small office on Vavilova Street in Moscow. There was no clear division of responsibilities between employees. “Everyone was doing everything,” Yandex employees recall about their work at that time. They also note a cozy, almost family-like work format, the atmosphere of which the company carefully preserves today.
By 2006, the company's staff had expanded significantly. The headquarters moved to Samokatnaya Street. Also at this time, a remote office was opened in St. Petersburg. In 2010, the company once again changed its location. The new address was a seven-story building on Lev Tolstoy Street. And not far from the headquarters, a banner appeared with the ironic inscription “We work for Leo Tolstoy.” In 2016, the company bought the building for $668 million.
.com
Since 2005, the company began to expand its geographical boundaries. The first to appear was Yandex.Ukraine, with an office in Odessa. In 2009, yandex.kz appeared, that is, the search engine started working in Kazakhstan. A year later it was followed by Belarus, and a year later by Türkiye. Today the company also has representative offices in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and China. Since 2010, the English version of the site began working: yandex.com.
In the spring of 2011, the company listed its shares on NASDAQ for the first time. On the very first day, their prices increased by forty percent, and Yandex’s business, initially valued at seven billion dollars, rose in price to eleven and a half billion.
Add-ons
It is important to understand that at the beginning of its history, Yandex was only a search engine. Its main feature and undoubted advantage was the ability to take into account the rich morphology of the Russian language. But Yandex today is a combination of many technologies, projects and applications.
Among the first services to be opened in 2000 were mail, news, goods, and postcards. "Yandex.Direct" and "Yandex.Money" became the basis of the company's income. In 2004, maps, blogs and posters appeared. In 2005, the Advertising Network opened. Next, dictionaries, videos, books, schedules and other useful services were created.
The company also makes a significant contribution to the education of students. An example of this was the opening of the “School of Data Analysis”, where training is provided free of charge.
Today
Over the twenty-year history of development and formation at Yandex, many important events have occurred. It was they who created the current appearance of the company. Hundreds of articles have been written about Yandex, and dozens of interviews have been conducted with search engine managers. The company's success is so impressive and amazing that people never tire of talking about it.
In 2013, the novel “Yandex Volozha: The Story of Creating a Dream Company” was published. This book included all the information (true and not so true) about Yandex and Arkady Volozh. The dedication is addressed to Ilya Segalovich, who, unfortunately, died at the time of the book’s publication. However, for some unknown reason, the writer kept silent about Ilya Valentinovich’s contribution to the creation and development of the search engine, and Volozh is presented as the only author of Yandex.
The main thing, perhaps, is that, despite the scale and title of the search leader in Russia, the Yandex company managed to retain that initial passion, the desire to develop and move forward, conquering new heights.
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? This article is about just that.
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 of the global Internet. Previously, people had to find out from friends the addresses of pages on which lists of Internet sites were located, or they themselves had to enter some addresses in English according to their semantic meaning. 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 looks for answers to questions asked in its own directory, but not from other search engines, although such solutions also exist. Recently, 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.
Arkady Yurievich Volozh, currently the CEO of Yandex, was born on February 11, 1964 in the city of Guryev (now Atyrau), Kazakh SSR. In 1986, he graduated from the I.M. Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow with a degree in applied mathematics. Subsequently, Volozh worked at the Institute of Management Problems (IPU) of the USSR Academy of Sciences and conducted research on processing large amounts of information.
In 1988, Volozh founded CompTek and remained its CEO until 2000. The CompTek company still operates successfully in the Russian market, being a distributor of software and equipment in the field of telecommunications.
In parallel with the management of CompTek, Volozh was writing a program that could search for information in large volumes of text. In 1989, together with Arkady Borkovsky, a specialist in computer linguistics, he founded the Arcadia company, which developed the information retrieval systems “Classification of Goods and Services” and “International Classification of Inventions.”
In 1993, Arcadia was merged with CompTek, and in the same year a program for searching information on a hard drive, called Yandex, was developed. In 1995, a decision was made to use the company's software developments on the Internet, although the Yandex.ru search engine was officially announced only on September 23, 1997 at the Softool information technology exhibition.
The capabilities of the Yandex.ru search engine expanded as the Russian segment of the Internet grew. In 2000, the shareholders of CompTek founded the Yandex company, with Arkady Volozh becoming its CEO. Also in 2000, the following services were opened: Yandex.Mail, Yandex.Bookmarks, Yandex.News, Yandex.Products, Yandex.Guru, Yandex.Postcards and.
In 2009, Yandex launched the Snezhinsk search program, which is based on Matrixnet, a machine learning method. This enabled users of 1,250 Russian cities to receive local search results. In 2010, Yandex's share in Runet search queries exceeded 60%, and on May 19, 2010, the company entered the international level by launching an English-language version of its search engine on the yandex.com domain. In the same year, one of the key services, Yandex.Maps, went live, and in 2011 another service, Yandex.Factory, was launched.
Arkady Volozh constantly combines management of Yandex (he owns 19.77% of shares with voting rights) with work in various areas related to information technology. In 1998, he headed the Wireless Access Networks Committee of the Russian Association of Documentary Telecommunications, also known as RANS.RU. In this position, Volozh took part in the deregulation of wireless access frequencies and made a significant contribution to the legalization of IP telephony in our country.
Since 2007, Arkady Volozh has been the head of the Department of Data Analysis, based on the Yandex company, at the Faculty of Innovation and High Technologies of the Moscow University of Physics and Technology. In 2010, the Kommersant newspaper placed Volozh in first place in the ranking of top executives in the Media Business category.
Arkady Volozh is married and has three children.
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 poor. When creating his search engine, Larry took the works of scientists as a model. The scheme was as follows - the better the robot was, 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. It was then that Google Inc was registered, the first office was rented (in fact, it was an ordinary garage), the first employees were hired and the first check was received from investor - millionaire Andy Bechtolstein 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 the Blogger publishing service in the USA. 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 also created its personal browser, Google Chrome, which today is one of the most convenient and frequently used browsers in the world.
History of the creation of Yandex
Do you want to learn how to write articles and make money online? Right now I am recruiting for free training using the author’s methodology. MAKE AN APPOINTMENT WITH PAVL YAMBU
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 considered to be September 23, 1997, when the search engine was first exhibited 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. Arkady Volozh became the CEO of Yandex.
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
