Yandex.ru is the largest and most popular search engine in Russia. It accounts for just under 65% of the searches that take place within the country. The website is currently the most popular in Russia and attracts users from all over the world, it currently accounts for 1.7% of all search engine queries placed throughout the world. Let’s take a little look at the history of this fantastic website.
The company started way back in 1990 when Arkady Yolozh and Arkady Borkovsky teamed up to create the company Arkadia. The company developed MS-DOS Software designed to search for patents. It included full-text support. Between the years of 1993 and 1996, the company worked hard to develop the search engine technologies that it had created. This resulted in software that enabled a user to browse through the biblical text and Russian Classic Literature.
In 1993 the name Yandex came into existence. It is an acronym for ‘Yet Another iNDEXer’. The website Yandex.ru was launched a few years later in 1997. By the year 2000 Yandex.ru had become the most visited Search Engine in Russia. A great deal of its success was down to the fact that it was based on Russian Morphology, which is much different from the English language which most other Search Engines are built around.
Yanex.Ru’s revenue comes from banner advertising. The first contextual banner was added to the website in 1998. The original intentions of these advertisements were to provide the user with an extra search result. Ultimately it ended up being the main source of revenue for the Yandex group of companies.
The company split away in 2000 when it became its own standalone company. A great deal of funding was secured during this time by Arkady Volozh who masterminded the split. This funding would help ensure the continual growth of the website.
In 2000 a system was put in place called Yandex.Direct, which works in pretty much the same way as Google AdWords. This system allows almost anyone to place their text ads on the Yandex.Ru website, which helped secure a great deal of revenue for the company.
In 2005 the company expanded outside of Russia and set up operations in Ukraine. Now the company also has offices in Kazakhstan and Belarus.
In 2008 the company opened the School of Data Analysis. The intention of this school was to recruit people to start learning about how to develop search engine systems. This has helped Yandex secure some fantastic new talent and remain innovative.
The Yandex.Ru website took a turn for the better with the release of MatrixNet, this new search algorithm really helped refine the results that were returned every time a user entered a search. The results are now more precise than they have ever been, and this helped to further intensify the company as the leading search provider in Russia. The company went public in 2011 with the ticker symbol YNDX. In 2011 the company began operating in its first country that doesn’t speak Russian, and that is Turkey.
In the English world, we really don’t look beyond Google and Yahoo for our search queries. It really sometimes is hard to believe that other large search engines exist out there. Yandex.Ru is one of these, and with the amount of investment they are placing into the company it is sure to become much bigger, maybe one day they will begin to tackle Google head-on.
Some of the other popular web services provided by the web company:
Yandex Mail – https://mail.yandex.com/ – (https://mail.yandex.ru/) – a free and reliable web-based mail service, used by a high percentage of Russians.
Yandex Video –Â https://video.yandex.ru/#top – A video search engine, similar to the biggest player in this field – Youtube.
Yandex Money – https://money.yandex.ru/ – a service allowing its users to safely pay online for products and services.
Dictionary – https://slovari.yandex.ru – very rich and complete Russian dictionary.
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