Early 1990s
The crisis of the 90s did not pass without a trace for the company "Arcadia", but at the same time it did not affect the assets of CompTek. Then it was decided to combine the two projects into one, leaving the more successful one as the main one.
The company's main activity is the supply of network and telecommunications equipment. By the way, by the end of the 1990s, this company became the largest distributor of Cisco Systems in Russia and the CIS with a turnover of tens of millions of dollars per year.
During the work process, the idea arose of creating a special computer program that would allow searching for information in large texts based on an informal request.
At that time, Arkady Volozh offered his school friend Ilya Segalovich a job. As Ilya himself recalls: "I was fired up, looking at Arkady! That's how you have to work! And that's how I started working . "
Ilya Segalovich
In 1993, as a result of the overseas chinese in usa data joint efforts of Volozh and Segalovich, a new version of the text search program appeared, which was called Yandex. The search algorithm worked on the basis of a digitized Russian spelling dictionary.
"Oh, this is a classic... Ilya suggested giving a personal name to the search technology. One of the names he suggested was Yet another index. Programmers love such things. I shortened it to Yandex. "Y" is a very Russian letter. It is not found in any other alphabet. Very good for RuNet."
From the information of Arkady Volozh
To demonstrate the product's capabilities to the general public, the developers decided to digitize the Bible, which they placed on several diskettes, and implemented a program for searching the text.
In 1994, the product was noticed, and the company received a solid order from the Institute of World Literature to produce digital copies of Griboyedov and Pushkin editions. The order was worth $20,000. Half of the amount was spent on increasing the team of programmers and new premises, and the remaining funds were used to purchase new modern equipment that allowed connection to high-speed Internet. This moment became a turning point in determining the further direction of development.
“We went online for a couple of months, read everything that was written there, looked at Altavista’s search and realized that we needed to make things for the Internet.”
Ilya Segalovich,
Co-founder of Yandex
1995-1999
When CompTek went online in 1995, it became clear that it was necessary to launch and make a working search engine as quickly as possible. Finally, the idea that Volozh had been nurturing since the late 1980s began to crystallize into a very real business.
While the company's employees were busy making digital copies of Russian classics, preparations were underway in the company's depths to launch its own Internet search engine.
Interesting fact! At one time, Arkady Volozh tried to sell the idea of a search engine to Rambler. But the project manager considered this idea unpromising and unprofitable. Apparently, he later regretted it greatly.
Then Arkady Volozh decided to invest his own funds in this business. In 1997, the search engine "Yandex.ru" was demonstrated for the first time, which was able to work with Runet websites. The company purchased three servers with 1 GB hard drives, which allowed indexing all the information on the Russian Internet and creating a search robot. By the way, the entire Runet at that time "weighed" no more than 4 GB. And in 1999, "Yandex" was already stably among the seven leading Runet websites.
Thus, Arkady Volozh’s billion-dollar fortune began with his own relatively modest $10,000.
Yandex and Arkady Volozh