Yandex story

Prehistory

The history of the company "Yandex" began in 1990 with the development of search software in the company "Arcadia". For two years of work, two information retrieval systems were created - International Classification of Inventions, 4th and 5th edition, as well as the Classifier of Goods and Services. Both systems worked under DOS and allowed to search, choosing words from the given dictionary, using standard logical operators.

In 1993, Arcadia became a division of CompTek. In 1993-1994, software technologies were substantially improved due to cooperation with the laboratory of Yu. D. Apresyan (Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences). In particular, the dictionary that provides a search with the morphology of the Russian language taken into account, was only 300 Kb, that is, it was loaded into RAM and worked very quickly. From that moment, the user could ask any form of words in the query.

Based on the new technology, in 1994, the "Biblical Computer Directory" was created (an information retrieval system that provides work with the Synodal translation of the Old and New Testaments). In 1995, the project "Academic edition of classics on CD ROM" was launched, developed in conjunction with the STC "Informregistr" and IMLI them. M. Gorky RAS with the support of Roskominform. For this project, the universal technology "Argonaut" was created, which included both markup and display tools, as well as navigation aids, as well as various searches - both textual and attribute. On the basis of this technology, 3 editions appeared - the reference book of the standards "Inform - Normative", the electronic scientific publication "A. S. Griboyedov "and" Pushkin. Electronic Fund of Russian Classical Literature ". Griboedov's language dictionary was also created.

At the beginning of 1996, an algorithm for constructing hypotheses was developed. Henceforth, the morphological analysis has ceased to be tied to the dictionary - if there is no word in the dictionary, then the dictionary words most similar to it are found and a word-change model is built on them.

At this time, the Internet in Russia was just beginning ...

Beginning

In the summer of 1996, CompTek's management and the developers of the search engine came to the conclusion that the development of the technology itself is more important and interesting than the creation of application products based on search. Market research has shown timeliness and great prospects for search technologies. Then the Internet and appeared "Yandex."

The word "Yandex" was invented a few years earlier by one of the main and oldest developers of the search engine. "Yandex" means "Language index", or, if in English, "Yandex" is "Yet Another indexer". During the 4-year public existence of Yandex, there were other interpretations. For example, if the word "Index" translates from English the first letter ("I" - "I"), you get "Yandex".

At the Netcom'96 exhibition, October 18, 1996, CompTek announced the first products of the Yandex series (Yandex.Site, Yndex.Dict). Яndex.Site - search on your site - now installed on hundreds of servers Runet. Yndex.Dict, the morphological extension of the query, is still used for, for example, to send a request to Yahoo, although today it is not so actual anymore - Yahoo indexes the Russian Internet much worse than Russian search engines.

Six months later appeared Yndex.CD - search for documents on CD-ROM, and then Yndex.Lib - a full-featured Yandex library for embedding in various applications and databases.

Six months later it became obvious that nothing separates CompTek from creating its own global search engine. The volume of the Runet was then only a few gigabytes. In the fall of 1997, Yandex.Ru was opened.

The need to support the work of Yandex.Ru under conditions of large volumes and heavy loads (several requests per second) leads to optimization of algorithms, which are then used in other Yandex products.

Search engine

Yandex appeared on the market when the search engines reigned there, which were searched on the English principle. It is known that in English, the words are almost not inclined.

Segalovich took Bible Symphony, studied the principle, because it was done taking into account the morphology. First, e-Bible (or rather the reference book) was searched, later this principle was adopted as a basis.

The search system Yandex.ru was officially announced on September 23, 1997, and for the first time it developed within the framework of CompTek International. As a separate company, "Yandex" was formed in 2000.

The company achieved self-sufficiency in 2002, the turnover for 2009 was $278 million.

By the way, the search engine Yandex could buy Rambler (on that time the search leaders in Runet), and very inexpensive, but could not assess the outlook.

Offices

All Yandex offices on the world map

The main office of the company is located in Moscow. The company has offices in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Odessa, Simferopol, Kiev and Kazan.
In mid-June 2008, the company announced the opening of Yandex Labs, an office in the US, California.

Yandex Search Features

• Checking the uniqueness of documents (excluding copies in different encodings).
• Search Yandex allows you to search for documents in Russian, Tatar, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Kazakh, English, German and French, taking into account the morphology of these languages ​​and the proximity of words in the sentence.
• A carefully designed algorithm for evaluating the relevance (matching the answer to a query), taking into account not only the number of query words found in the text, but also the "contrast" of the word (its relative frequency for the given document), the distance between words, and the position of the word in the document.