Yandex - History

History

Yandex's roots trace back to 1990, when Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky founded the company Arkadia, which developed MS-DOS software for use in patents and goods classification. Their software featured a full-text search with Russian morphology support. In 1993 Arkadia became a subdivision of Comptek International, another company founded by Volozh in 1989. In 1993-1996 the company continued developing its search technologies and released software for searching through the Bible and Russian classical literature.

In 1993 Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, friends since their school days and by then working together to develop search software, invented the word "Yandex" to describe their search technologies. The name initially stood for "Yet Another iNDEXer". The Russian word "Я" ("Ya") corresponds to the English personal pronoun "I", making "Яndex" a bilingual pun on "index". Another pun is based on the yin and yang contrast (Russian: инь - индекс, ян - яндекс).

The search engine yandex.ru was launched on September 23, 1997 and was publicly presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. Initially the search engine was developed by Comptek. In 2000 Yandex was incorporated as a standalone company by Arkady Volozh.

Yandex's revenue comes primarily from online advertisement. In 1998 Yandex launched contextual advertisement on its search engine. In 2001 it launched the Yandex.Direct advertisement network. Yandex LLC became profitable in November 2002. In 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17M, which was 10 times greater than the company's revenue just two years earlier. The net income of the company in 2004 constituted $7M. In June 2006, the weekly revenue of Yandex.Direct context ads system exceeded $1M. All of Yandex's accounting measures have been audited by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu since 1999.

In September 2005 Yandex opened an office in the Ukraine and presented the Ukrainian portal, www.yandex.ua. In 2008 Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow datacenters and UA-IX in Ukraine five times. In 2007 Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users; Yandex also opened its development center in Kiev in May 2007. In 2009, all services of www.yandex.ua were localized for the Ukrainian market. In 2010, Yandex launched its "Poltava" search engine algorithm for Ukrainian users, based on Yandex's MatrixNet technology and ranking local resources higher for location-based queries.

In March 2007 Yandex acquired moikrug.ru, a Russian social network, to search and support professional and personal contacts.

In June 2008 Yandex acquired SMI Link, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge it with Yandex.Maps services.

In September 2008 Yandex further acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.

Yandex also founded Yandex Labs in 2008. The main objective of the company, located in the San Francisco Bay area, is to foster "innovation in search and advertising technology".

In August 2009 Yandex introduced a player of free legal music in its search results. A little over a year later Yandex launched the Yandex.Music service and significantly extended its music catalogue to 800,000 tracks from 58,000 performers.

On May 19, 2010, Yandex launched an English-only web search engine.

In 2010 Yandex launched the Yandex.Start program to find startups and to work with them systematically. As a result of the program, Yandex purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010. In January 2011 the next startup, single sign-in service Loginza, was acquired by Yandex.

In January 2011 Yandex introduced premium placement opportunity in its Business directory; advertisers' local small businesses will be highlighted on a map for relevant queries. It was announced that the potential audience of the product includes over 25 million users of Yandex's search engine and over 11.5 million of Yandex.Maps.

In spring 2011 Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering on NASDAQ. It was the biggest U.S. IPO for a dotcom since Google Inc. went public in 2004. Among the largest investors in Yandex were Baring Vostok Capital Partners and Tiger Global Management.

In August 2011 Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times, a news delivery startup.

In September 2011 Yandex launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, at yandex.com.tr. The company also opened an office in Istanbul.

In November 2011 Yandex acquired developer SPB Software.