Birthday of the Yandex search engine

The global web provides anyone with access to huge amounts of data. This is the world's largest repository of information, where you can find everything - the history of handbags, tips for cleaning the house, the theory of relativity for dummies, Shakespeare's original novels and a list of differences between different types of tea. The answer to absolutely any question can be found on the Internet, but how to carry out this search? When we come to the library, the employee who works there helps us find the book we need. He has registration cards and knows the book aisle navigation by heart. On the Internet, this function is performed by search engines. Search engines are “bridges” that help the user get to the necessary data - find it and read/view/download it as quickly as possible. The most popular search engines in RuNet are Google, Yandex and Yahoo! On September 23, the silver medalist of this rating, the main brainchild of the largest IT company in Russia, celebrates his birthday. What do we know about the search engine that has helped us out so many times? The first systems that searched web pages were Wandex and ALIWEB, which were created in 1993. At the same time, the Yandex application appeared. At that time, it only worked within one site. Using the application, the user could quickly find information on a web resource. Although the real history of Yandex began even earlier - in the 80s, when employees of the Arcadia company began to work closely on the development of search algorithms. Their projects took into account the morphology of the Russian language, and their products were aimed at a Russian-speaking audience. This organization subsequently became part of CompTek, which marked a turning point in its history. The original name of the company, as often happens, was invented by accident. Ilya Segalovich shortened the English expression “yet another indexer” to the more laconic “Yandex”, and Arkady Volozh subsequently proposed replacing the first two letters with the Russian “Ya”. The result was a simple, original name that users remembered without difficulty. The developers spent almost four years improving their project. On September 23, 1997, at the Softool exhibition in Moscow, Yandex was presented as a full-fledged search engine. At that time, there were only about 5,000 sites on the RuNet - a drop in the ocean when compared with the number of web resources today. As you know, great things begin with small things. To create this project, the creators bought three servers with 1 GB hard drives. The total cost was $10,000. Interestingly, in the first version the search engine logo was located at an angle. The creators wanted to add such a twist, but it generated a lot of jokes among users, and the idea was abandoned. In 1998, the first contextual advertising appeared in Yandex, which was shown only to a specific target audience with suitable queries. Two years later, a separate company, Yandex, was created. The largest project came of age and prepared for adulthood, although among its founders were CompTek shareholders. Contextual advertising turned out to be very profitable. Already in 2002, the project fully paid for itself and began to generate considerable income for shareholders. Even today, contextual advertising occupies an important place in the business model of this company, and its capital in 2017 was estimated at 367 billion rubles. In those days, Yandex had a strong competitor in RuNet - Rambler. Although this confrontation was tense, it did not last long. In 2001, Yandex overtook Rambler, which has since gradually fallen into oblivion. Today, the only “strong” competitor to the domestic search network can only be considered the international Google system. In terms of the number of requests processed, Yandex ranks fourth in the overall list, and among non-English-language networks it ranks second, second only to the Asian Baidu.