The Russian search engine that launched in 1997 was Yandex.
Yandex was publicly announced on September 23, 1997, at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. The search engine was developed by CompTek, with key work by Arkady Volozh, Ilya Segalovich, and Arkady Borkovsky. It was designed especially for searching Russian-language content, including the complex morphology and word forms of Russian.
The name “Yandex” is commonly expanded as “Yet Another Indexer.” It also contains a bilingual wordplay: “Ya” means “I” in Russian, while “index” refers to a searchable catalogue of information. The project’s roots predated its public launch; its developers had already built tools for indexing text, including documents and Biblical material.
Yandex became an independent company in 2000 and grew into a broad technology group offering maps, advertising, music, cloud services, transportation, and other products. It is sometimes nicknamed “Russia’s Google,” but that comparison can obscure its distinctive early focus on Russian-language search and linguistic processing. Rambler and Mail.ru were other Russian internet brands, not the answer to this launch-date question.