Yandex was co-founded by Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh.
The partnership began around 1990, when Volozh brought his former schoolmate Segalovich into a project developing algorithms for searching Russian-language texts. Their work initially operated through Arcadia, a company that built search software for unstructured information and Russian morphology. In 1993, they created the name “Yandex,” a bilingual play on “Yet Another iNDEXer” and the Russian word “ya,” meaning “I.”
The Yandex.ru search engine launched publicly on September 23, 1997, at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. Yandex later became a broad technology company offering maps, email, advertising, transport, and other services. A common mix-up is treating Yandex as merely a Russian version of Google; it developed distinctive language-processing technology designed for the complexities of Russian search.