Who owns Yandex search engine? Yandex creator

All our activities are a struggle against entropy.
This process, of course, is endless.
Arkady Volozh.

Today Yandex offers users not just a search, but a whole range of useful . Among the many resources, Yandex ranks first in Russia in terms of traffic. Websites have been opened for users from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, which are also popular with residents of these countries because they contain many additional services.

Nowadays, numerous services available on Yandex allow, and. In addition to searching the Internet for texts, videos and pictures, users are offered product searches and price comparisons, mail, weather forecasts, TV and transport schedules, tools for webmasters, corporate solutions, developed and a lot of other useful projects. Yandex is often looked up to as the flagship of Russian Internet technologies, which is not without reason: it is under this brand that new search technologies have already seen the light of day, and many incredible ideas are constantly being implemented.

However, the concept of Yandex as a connection between an Internet search engine and all other things that greatly facilitate the everyday life of an Internet user was not born immediately, and neither was the search technology itself. As befits every ambitious project, it was preceded by a long and winding path, the history of which began back in the days when the Global Network in Russia was talked about only in the bowels of scientific research institutes.

Background: voluntary-obligatory cooperative

It was 1988. At that time, he had just completed his studies as a mathematician and programmer. Arkady Volozh worked at the Institute of Control Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he researched the possibility of processing large amounts of data, and the management Soviet Union tried to put the country on the feet of a market economy. Adopted Law they began to implement the idea of cooperation on a scale characteristic of Soviet leaders, and the head of the department where Volozh worked, without further hesitation, appointed him co-founder of the newly created cooperative.

Since enterprises at that time did not have enough automated jobs, and the experience of the institute’s employees could solve this problem, it was decided to import Austrian personal computers, exchanging them (it was a wonderful time!) for seeds. However, Arkady was not directly involved in selling computers, but only performed technical work.

At that time, he met an American student who had come for guard duty. Robert Stubblebine, from whom I took English lessons. But the common interests of the two young people were not limited to foreign languages, and already in 1989 they jointly founded the company CompTek, engaged in sales of computer equipment. So the company could specialize only in hardware, if not for Volozh’s old connections.

Teach the computer to understand Russian

Having become deeply involved in commerce, Arkady Volozh did not give up his main place of work. At the institute, he continued to work on a program focused on searching for information in large volumes of text data. Then Arkady came to the idea that it was necessary to somehow take into account the rich inflection inherent in the Russian language. And at that moment a person was found who was able to help cope with this difficult task. He became Arkady Borkovsky, who studied problems of computational linguistics at the Academy of Sciences. At the same time, the first important task appeared, where it was possible to successfully apply existing developments: the Institute of Patent Information needed a searchable classifier of inventions.

So two Arkady, Borkovsky and Volozh, created a company called “Arcadia”. They were joined by several programmers, among whom was Volozh’s friend from school. So, after much effort, the distribution kit of the “International Classifier of Inventions” was ready. It was also decided to sell it as a product for organizations working with patents.

At first, everything went well: the product sold about three years, and there was enough money to pay employees and newspapers. Then the “Classifier of Goods and Services” was developed. But the economy in the country dictated its own conditions in the early nineties, and buying such software products have become significantly worse. On the other hand, Volozh's second company, CompTek, was gaining momentum by providing computers and networks to financial institutions. At that moment, a bold step was taken to preserve existing promising developments in the absence of demand: in 1993, it was decided to transform the small staff of Arcadia into the CompTek programming department.

Meanwhile, work continued on improving the search engine code. A team of specialists in the field of structural linguistics led by Yuri Apresyan provided a high-quality dictionary, and Ilya Segalovich and a group of programmers began to integrate it into the existing technology, which made the search capabilities even wider. The new CompTek department then took on more complex tasks. In 1994, it was decided to create a system for working with the Synodal Translation of the Bible, and in 1995 - with the academic publication of Pushkin and Griboedov for the Institute of World Literature.

Yet another indexer

When it became clear in 1993 that work on a new technology for searching Russian-language texts would continue, it was decided to come up with a simple and catchy name for it. Ilya began to write down words on a piece of paper that were related to technology. However, no original solutions didn't occur to me. Then he took a different path. At that time, many new programs for UNIX-like systems due to the lack of desire to come up with an original name, they were simply called by adding the combination “yet another” to any word, meaning “one more.” This is how “yet another indexer” appeared - “yet another indexer” or Yandex. I liked this name, especially since it can be deciphered as Language Index. Arkady suggested replacing the combination “ya” with the Russian “ya” to emphasize the focus on the Russian language. And so it appeared Yandex.

Then Artemy Lebedev offered an interesting interpretation: “I” in the word “Index” is translated into Russian as “I”. It turned out to be a kind of “index” in Russian. Already during the operation of the site, users came up with a new decoding with the division of the Internet in the spirit of Eastern philosophy into INDEX and YANDEX. But these two interpretations appeared much later, after the release of Yandex. For now, there was only technology that was tied to specific software products.

New Yandex for the new Internet

Even while working on the academic edition of the classics, an algorithm for constructing hypotheses was created. This algorithm made it possible to avoid strict binding to the dictionary that was available in the program. And he worked as follows. If during the search process any unfamiliar word comes across, the algorithm analyzes it and predicts the inflection paradigm, using an already existing dictionary, just as native speakers, having once heard new term, can consume it in various forms.

Then, in 1996, the developers realized that the new technology could be developed and sold independently, without being tied to specific texts. This idea was a very timely solution, since many companies needed similar systems search, and the Internet was gaining momentum in the country. In the fall of the same year, the opportunity arose to show the results of this work.

C ompTek took part in the Netcom"96 exhibition, where it presented two new products: Yandex.Dict, which was a layer between, who did not understand Russian morphology, and the user, and Yandex.Site- a search engine designed for installation on Internet sites. Over time, the first solution became not very popular, and Yandex.Site, which turned into Yandex.Server, and continues to be used today on many resources. A little more time passed, and the Yandex line was supplemented with two new products. It was Yandex.CD which helps to find required document on CD, and Yandex.Lib- a package for developers who need search capabilities for your products.

A November 25, 1996 Yandex took its first timid step onto the Internet. Anyone has the opportunity to perform a convenient search for Russian-language text using the popular search engine AltaVista. For this, the already mentioned query generation mechanism Yandex.Dict was used. Then it became clear that to create your own search engine All that's missing is a small step - indexing Russian-language resources with your own bot. This was a relatively simple task: once the robot was launched, it indexed everything available resources, of which there were 5 thousand, which amounted to 4 GB of texts.

At the next exhibition there was an opportunity to show the solution in a favorable light Yandex.Web from CompTek, which can find everything on the Internet. Resource yandex.ru was opened on September 23, and its presentation took place 2 days later, on September 25, 1997, at the Softool "97 exhibition. The first version of the site with the original “slanted” design was created by Artemy Lebedev (his studio is still working on the appearance of Yandex services) And a CompTek employee kept in touch with users. Elena Kolmanovskaya, which took on the burden of establishing dialogue with the public.

Work for the people

Then it turned out that new service has outgrown the scope of a simple demonstration of the capabilities of Yandex technology. They began to use it regular users, and the number of requests began to increase rapidly. That is why, after two months, the developers taught the search engine natural Russian. Yandex began to understand not only queries made using logical operators, but also ordinary sequences made up of several words. In addition to this, the new search engine was able to recognize the uniqueness of a document, showing only one copy in the results, and had its own relevance assessment algorithm, which made it possible to obtain among the first links the resources most relevant to the search query.

On September 30, i.e. a week after the opening of Yandex.Web, the first “Yandex fairy tale” appeared, a study of the contents of the Russian Internet with some philosophical overtones, and in December it became known that a link to Yandex would appear in the Russian version.

During 1998, the number of indexed texts doubled. To maintain performance, the developers partially changed the search engine algorithms. This year the design was updated and new convenient additions. It is now possible to search among the results, as well as see what other users are looking for at the moment. Academic Search, now called Advanced, has two new features: sorting by date and searching for documents within a specific time range. The introduced “find similar documents” option deserves special attention. Users were able to clarify the request simply by clicking on the appropriate link.

The year 1999 can be called the year of the development of the Internet. Then the amount of information and users increased by an order of magnitude, and meanwhile Yandex came in fourth or fifth place in popularity. To better index the sharply increased volume of data, a new robot has been launched. It was created with the goal of effectively filtering spam, and also indexed image captions, descriptions and took into account much better, which made it possible to introduce search functions for one site and links to a specified resource.

To the already existing regularly published “fairy tales”, reflecting with a slight degree of irony the contents of network resources, was added the Index of Inconstancy of Interests of the Internet Population, abbreviated as NINI-index. From January 1, 1999 to January 1, 2005, weekly summaries were posted reflecting trends in search queries. They represented two top five words, the interest in which over the week most sharply changed towards an increase (“finds”) or a decrease (“losses”). Yandex began to communicate more closely with users: a forum about the search engine appeared and the ability to subscribe to changes in search results for the desired query was added. The new mechanism, called " Subject Citation Index (TIC)", from now on, organized resources by importance and popularity, and search in categories made it possible to find information only among sites on a certain topic. " Family search ”, designed to prevent pages with obscene or erotic content from appearing in the results.

1 December 5, 1999 Yandex and netBridge opened Molotok.Ru. This was followed by a joint project, which started on February 15, 2000. Coming out under the motto “Build your website in 60 seconds!”, it provided anyone with the opportunity to have a personal page. Soon the companies divided their areas of interest, and Molotok.Ru came under the full control of netBridge, and Narod.Ru became the property of Yandex. The changes that occurred in 1999 finally secured the status of a social service for Yandex and predetermined further development. In just over two years, Yandex gained recognition and earned consistently high traffic, which became the reason for the changes that took place the following year.

Yandex promotion

The success of the new project predetermined the further history of its development, which required additional resources and assumed a management model that was radically different from that used at CompTek. Since 1999, Arkady Volozh, having chosen the promotion of Yandex as his main occupation, began to select from many potential partners. It was necessary to find people experienced in corporate construction who would not require a complete transfer of management and would be willing to invest a sufficient amount of funds.

And in the spring of 2000, an extremely important event occurred: an investment agreement was concluded with the company ru-Net Holdings, under which it received a little more than a third of the search engine. Yandex began to exist independently, separating from CompTek, and Arkady Volozh became the general director of the new company. It was not the company's style to receive money and do nothing, so an expansion of staff and a grandiose development of the resource immediately followed.

The design changed for the fifth time, and an “ascetic” version of ya.ru appeared. On the other hand, new services have become available, such as Yandex.News, Yandex.Products, Yandex.Guru And Yandex.Mail. The culmination of innovations was the week of launches of new services that took place in June 2000, which ended with the Yandex holiday. The toolbar was released in the fall Yandex.Bar. Also, 2000 was the year of the beginning of a large-scale advertising campaign, for which the slogan “Everything will be found!” was coined, which is still used today. The second advertising campaign, which started at the end of the year, was held under the slogan “All questions to Yandex.”

Yandex celebrated New Year 2001 with the promotion “ New Year's message The people of Russia to the President”, in which everyone could take part. All received “letters” were summarized into a single text of the appeal. In mid-February, Yandex settled at a new address, where it acquired its own server room, since new services and an increasing flow of users required an expansion of the hardware base. By the summer, Yandex was able to top the list of the most visited Russian-language resources for the first time in its history.

In 2001 it was established Russian Open Internet Search Cup, also called the Yandex Cup. In the first year there were 2 cups, and until 2009 there were 9 cups and a competition between the winners, the so-called Cup Winners' Cup. Like the previous year, Yandex greeted 2002 with a memorable campaign. This time it was dedicated to the introduction of the euro into circulation.

Meanwhile, Runet was developing, and already in the spring the volume of data indexed by Yandex exceeded the landmark threshold of 1 TB. Users now have the ability to search for images using Yandex.Images, and in the summer together with a group of companies PayCash was launched. This was a significant step towards expanding the scope of services provided by Yandex, and had a noticeable impact on the Russian Internet as a whole.

Certain improvements related to filtering unwanted correspondence have also affected Yandex.Mail. At the end of 2002, three independent services, Pick Up, Guru and Products, were merged into Yandex.Market, a project that is still popular today. This year, the company's management set an ambitious goal - to achieve self-sufficiency. It was decided to build a commercial model on , which made it possible not only to complete the task, but also to do it even before all the expected deadlines. The next stage in the development of Yandex has been completed.

Focus on creativity

In 2003 great attention was given postal service, which has undergone further changes that have made it more convenient. These changes continued the following year: Yandex.Mail users received an unlimited mailbox size and a new “Spam Defense” spam filter. Also in 2003, a transition was made to the eighth version of the design. This time, take part in a two-week test of the new look. home page and anyone could make constructive suggestions. It was slightly modified a year later, and in this form the page existed until 2007.

The Yandex.News service was significantly redesigned, becoming an organized collection of the most important news messages, grouped by topic. Photos and videos appeared in the news. The Internet search itself has also undergone changes: RTF, PDF and DOC documents now appear in the results, which has made it easier to find, for example, the necessary documentation, and XML output has been implemented for webmasters. A year later, support for PPT and XLS formats was added, as well as indexing of sites made in Flash.

In addition to the yandex.ru resource, other company products were also developed. So in 2003, the Yandex search engine started working on the presidential website, and in the fall a new line was presented, which included three solutions: Yandex.Server, which grew out of Yandex.Site, Yandex.Publisher, including Yandex.CD, and Yandex.SDK, which became continuation of Yandex.Lib. On June 3, 2003, the board of directors decided to pay the first dividends in the history of Russian Internet companies, amounting to $100,000, which was a completely logical step for a self-sustaining company. Yandex received two thirds of its revenue from contextual advertising. The following year, advertising profits tripled, and 2004 showed fantastic growth rates in the profitability of the business model created by Yandex.

Meanwhile on Russian market search engines International players appeared. They had no less developed technological base and constituted serious competition to Yandex. Runet was becoming closer to the West, which required not only maintaining the quality of the services provided, but radically changing the entire company. This affected not only search: all services required a new look. Yandex managers, accustomed to changes, coped with this task: they managed to expand the staff from 200 to 2,000 people, without turning into a dry corporation, but while maintaining the developed creative style that users loved.

During this time, many new projects were launched, and existing ones received many improvements. Opened for users Yandex.Maps, subsequently closely associated with many other services and becoming one of priority areas. Earned Yandex.WiFi, saw the light Yandex.Afisha and other projects, the hallmark of many of which was their focus on the needs of Russian users. It has become a tradition to hold regional seminars. This approach was correct: Russian company had undeniable advantages over international competitors in this regard, which ensured the victory of Yandex in the Russian market.

At the same time, with timid steps, the company began to expand its geography, so in 2005 a Ukrainian representative office opened.

Time to expand your horizons

Now Yandex is working on two fronts: the company is trying to improve local services and cover foreign Internet space. In 2007, the Ukrainian version of the yandex.ua search was opened, and 2008 was the year the Yandex Labs division, located in California, was opened. In the same year, Yandex carried out significant work aimed at supporting international Internet standards such as Sitemap, and the GZIP, FOAF and MediaRSS protocols. This made it possible to work more efficiently with indexing not only Russian, but also foreign resources.

In the meantime, there was a noticeable change in the Yandex logo: all the letters became Russian and lost their serifs, gaining a technological look.

In 2009, a program was launched that provides users search results, most suitable for a particular city when required. On the other hand, in the same year, Yandex became closely involved in foreign content: testing began on a service that provides translation of found foreign sites, which was released already in 2011 under the name Yandex.Translation. In May 2010, users were able to search only among foreign sites by enabling the appropriate option or using the yandex.com domain. Then a search for images and videos was added to yandex.com. Yandex.by and the Tatar version of search started working.

At the same time, the number of local services for Ukraine grew and a regional search appeared, called “Poltava”. It was based on technology Matrixnet, applied a year earlier in the Snezhinsk program. The Yandex.Maps service, which has grown significantly over several years, has acquired its own mapping company, GIS Technologies. This is how Yandex came to 2011, which became another milestone in the development of the company.

At the very beginning of the year, advertisers were offered a new service - geo-advertising, which suggests highlighting organizations on maps and displaying such maps in search results. The Yandex.Fabrika startup investment program was launched, in which not only Russian but also foreign projects were able to take part.

In May 2011, Yandex made an initial public offering on the high-tech NASDAQ exchange, which turned out to be even more successful than expected. They were placed 14% higher than forecast and rose in value by another 42% on the first day of trading. In terms of the volume of funds raised ($1.3 billion) as a result of the initial offering, Yandex took an honorable second place in the list of Internet companies, not surpassing only , which earned $1.67 billion in 2004. From this moment begins a new page in the history of Yandex, which has grown from an ambitious project into a huge company, while successfully preserving the unique style loved by millions of users.

Yandex is the undisputed leader among other Internet resources in Russia. Now it is not just a search engine, but a whole system useful services. It enjoys enormous success outside its founding country. Yandex has conquered Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Its popularity was largely due to the presence additional functions. This article will tell you about who invented Yandex and when this project was born.

Origins of creation

The history of the creation of a search engine begins long before the official launch. Whoever invented Yandex probably had no idea how famous this project would be. The roots of the idea go back to the eighties of the twentieth century. At that time, the Arcadia company was developing software that specialized in information retrieval. The leaders of the project, that is, directly those who came up with Yandex, were two Arcadia programmers - Borkovsky and Volozh. This system really attracted the attention of CompTek, which represented the computer and component market. This only gave additional impetus to the creators of the project. And now they, even more confident in their abilities, decided on the advisability of developing the system and releasing Yandex to the masses.

The photo below shows the Yandex team that worked on the search engine in the first years after the creation of the resource.

Modern interpretation

The same “Yandex” that everyone is so used to seeing was formed only in 1996. This year the site itself appeared.

The official presentation took place only a year later - in ninety-seven. At that time, Yandex was only a subsidiary of CompTek International. The search engine achieved recognition and independence only three years after the announcement.

Even at the time of the search engine’s presentation to the public, it supported the implementation of interesting functions:

issuance of documents corresponding to the request;
search for identical options and exclude one of them;
search according to word form, understanding and ability to distinguish words by morphological characteristics;
processing data within a paragraph, the developed algorithm takes into account the distance;
quantity accounting keywords on the page;
paid attention to the arrangement of words and the spaces between them.

Name idea

Whoever came up with “Yandex” had an idea about the name of the system long before the long-awaited release of the search engine. According to legend, word Yandex stands for "language index". If you interpret the meaning from English, you get Yet another indexer - “another indexer (search engine).”

There is another version that talks about the appearance of just such a name. The first letter of the English word Index, if it sounded in the system’s native language, corresponds to the Russian I on the keyboard.

But in any case, the initiators of this particular name are the company’s director of technology and the system developer

Site interface

CompTek demonstrated the first search engine functions a year before the official release. Then, back in 1996, the first Yandex products were presented at the Netcom’96 exhibition. These were "Yandex.Dict", that is, a dictionary, and "Yandex.Site". The latter provided the opportunity for site owners to inform the system about new and deleted pages, index and improve the presentation of an electronic resource in search results. The service is similar to today's Yandex.Webmaster.

This is what the Yandex home page looked like in 1998.

After the presented services, two more products were almost immediately developed - “Yandex.CD” and “Yandex.Lib”. The first one helped to search for the necessary CD ROM files. The second one is needed during installation various programs and databases.

The first design of the site was quite simple. Whoever invented Yandex was well aware of the design imperfections. However great effort were applied to the functional part rather than the aesthetic one. Responsible for this part work was Artemy Lebedev.

It was a good idea to organize a Yandex forum. The main purpose of its creation was to obtain new thoughts to improve the project, which was to be carried out through communication between users and developers. This option functioned perfectly until 2008. Afterwards the system was transformed, but this idea remained, only now it is in own blog"Yandex". According to the developers, this was done in order to increase socialization.

Nineties

Since the one who invented the Yandex search engine understood its powerful potential, a decision was made to refine and improve the system. Already a year after official presentation The developers took up the search engine. The results of the work were visible to users in the form of expanded functionality. These include filtered searches and similar documents.

Also, attention was finally paid to the external design of the site. Users also appreciated the design improvements. But still, from the functional, technical side, the changes were more significant.

In the first couple of years, the search engine rapidly gained popularity, and the number of users grew steadily. Since technological progress does not stand still, the company was constantly learning something new, which was reflected in the products it produced. For example, thanks to the introduction of a new search bot, the process itself has become faster. At the same time, the number of operations performed per unit of time increased.

For the average user, the noticeable improvements were as follows:

The ability to select search parameters to specify it and narrow the range of options. That is, now you can search for the necessary data by signatures, annotations, pictures and headings separately.
Introducing restrictions on a certain number of electronic resources.
Files in Russian were allocated in a separate category.

At the same time, such a concept as thematic index citation, which indicates the authority of an electronic resource. Then this indicator depended on the number of sites linking to the analyzed domain.

The design of the site has become more modern, somewhat reminiscent of the current design.

In the same year, the developers introduced a website builder - "Narod.ru".

New millennium

It was with the beginning of the new millennium that the company was able to reach a new level of its development. The system positioned its social orientation, so it attracted more more users.

A further impetus for development was influenced by the decision of one of the creators of Yandex to actively promote this project. Now the company was looking for a partner and investor. It became the company ru-Net Holdings.

Since the new partner invested incredible amounts of money in Yandex, he also secured the right to change the staff. But this only benefited the project.

From that moment on, serious changes began in the company. The multifunctionality of the system began to be clearly expressed. This is clearly noticeable by the fact that new services appeared that were in no way related to search work. These include "News", "Bookmarks" and "Mail". Some of them were soon combined into the combined Yandex.Market application. The developers also ensured that the system is integrated with user browsers. This option is called "Yandex.Bar".

"Yandex.Money"

Who invented "Yandex.Money"? In 2001, the release of services not related to search continued. And the next project was Yandex.Money. The emergence of the electronic payment system was influenced by the fact that it was in 2001 that the project became the most successful among Russian users.

It also appeared additional option- "Yandex.Pictures". Thanks to the constant expansion of the range of services offered, the amount of information stored on the company’s servers grew. At the time of 2001, this volume was one terabyte.

Work continued on the design of the search engine. Now the main page is full of icons for various services. Separately, links to news and new products were provided.

"Yandex.Direct" and "Photo"

This year has been a banner year for website and enterprise application developers. Surely all these people mentally thank the one who came up with Yandex.Direct. At that time, this service was very unfinished and had many shortcomings. For the most part it target audience there were advertisers, not web specialists.

For ordinary users, the appearance of another option became more noticeable. Whoever came up with Yandex.Photo probably didn’t expect such a success for the service.

Since in previous years the company was actively expanding its geography, it was not at all surprising that Yandex opened a representative office in Ukraine. There are now eleven offices in the world, each of them is assigned certain type activities.

Creating a Browser

One of the most significant events in recent years was the appearance of a proprietary browser from this company. The one who came up with Yandex.Browser was guided by the capabilities of another company, because the result should have been no worse. Competition is the engine of progress, so it is not surprising that, following Google, Yandex also released its product. But, unlike a competing company, the developers presented their browser in 2012 ( Google Chrome was announced in 2008). But this was also a mistake by the developers, since Google was not so popular in 2010, but by the time Yandex.Browser was released, it had completely consolidated its position. Moreover, the development of a competing company is taken as a basis, only supplemented with proprietary differences.

"Yandex.Transport"

In 2014, the company presented another project. Whoever invented Yandex.Transport wanted to make life easier modern man who is forced to constantly be on the move. The basis of the application is a map of the locality, which indicates the movement of vehicles in real time. That is, a person standing at a bus stop can clearly determine how much longer he needs to wait for transport. The service is also equipped with an alarm clock that will tell you the right time to exit public transport.

Yandex is a Russian IT company, which owns the Internet search system and Internet portal of the same name. The Yandex search engine is 5th among search sites in the world in terms of the number of processed search queries. As of October 16, 2012, according to Alexa.com rankings, In terms of popularity, the website yandex.ru ranks 20th in the world and 1st in Russia.

The search engine Yandex.ru was officially announced on September 23, 1997, and at first developed within the framework of CompTek International. Yandex was formed as a separate company in 2000. In May 2011, Yandex held an initial public offering, earning more from it than any Internet company since the IPO of the search engine Google in 2004.

The main and priority direction of the company is the development of a search engine, but over the years, Yandex has become a multi-portal. In 2011, Yandex provides more than 30 services. The most popular are: Yandex.Pictures, Yandex.Mail, Yandex.Maps, Yandex.News, Yandex.Weather and others.

However, the concept of Yandex as a connection between an Internet search engine and all other things that greatly facilitate the everyday life of an Internet user was not born immediately, and neither was the search technology itself. As befits every ambitious project, it was preceded by a long and winding path, the history of which began back in the days when the global network in Russia was only talked about in the bowels of scientific research institutes.

Yandex video stories on Russia 24 channel in the Technopark program

Background: voluntary-obligatory cooperative

The year was 1988. At that time, mathematician and programmer Arkady Volozh, who had just completed his studies, worked at the Institute of Management Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he researched the possibility of processing large amounts of data, and the leadership of the Soviet Union tried to put the country on the feet of a market economy. They began to implement the adopted Law on Cooperation on a scale characteristic of Soviet leaders, and the head of the department where Volozh worked, without further hesitation, appointed him co-founder of the newly formed cooperative.

Since enterprises at that time lacked automated jobs, and the experience of the institute’s workers could solve this problem, it was decided to import Austrian personal computers, exchanging them (it was a wonderful time!) for seeds. However, Arkady was not directly involved in selling computers, but only performed technical work.

At that time, he met an American student, Robert Stubblebine, who had come on guard, from whom he took English lessons. But the common interests of the two young people were not limited only to foreign languages, and already in 1989 they jointly founded the company CompTek, which sold computer equipment. So the company could have specialized only in hardware if not for Volozh’s old connections.

Teach the computer to understand Russian

Having become deeply involved in commerce, Arkady Volozh did not give up his main place of work. At the institute, he continued to work on a program focused on searching for information in large volumes of text data. Then Arkady came to the idea that it was necessary to somehow take into account the rich inflection inherent in the Russian language. And at that moment a person was found who was able to help cope with this difficult task. It was Arkady Borkovsky, who studied problems of computer linguistics at the Academy of Sciences. At the same time, the first important task appeared, where it was possible to successfully apply existing developments: the Institute of Patent Information needed a searchable classifier of inventions.

So two Arkady, Borkovsky and Volozh, created a company called Arcadia. They were joined by several programmers, among whom was Ilya Segalovich, Volozh’s friend since school. So, after much effort, the distribution kit of the “International Classifier of Inventions” was ready. It was also decided to sell it as a product for organizations working with patents.

At first, everything worked out well: the product was sold for about three years, and there was enough money to pay employees and advertise in newspapers. Then the “Classifier of Goods and Services” was developed. But the economy in the country dictated its own conditions in the early nineties, and buying such software products became much worse. On the other hand, Volozh's second company, CompTek, was gaining momentum by providing computers and networks to financial institutions. At that moment, a bold step was taken to preserve existing promising developments in the absence of demand: in 1993, it was decided to transform the small staff of Arcadia into the CompTek programming department.

Meanwhile, work continued on improving the search engine code. A team of specialists in the field of structural linguistics, led by Yuri Apresyan, provided a high-quality dictionary, and Ilya Segalovich and a group of programmers began to integrate it into the existing technology, which made the search capabilities even wider. The new CompTek department then took on more complex tasks. In 1994, it was decided to create a system for working with the Synodal Translation of the Bible, and in 1995, an academic publication of Pushkin and Griboyedov for the Institute of World Literature.

Origin of the word "Yandex"

When in 1993 it became clear that work on a new technology for searching Russian-language texts would continue, it was decided to come up with a simple and catchy name for it. Ilya began to write down words on a piece of paper that were related to technology. However, no original solutions came to mind. Then he went a different way. At that time, many new programs for UNIX-like systems, due to the lack of desire to come up with an original name, were simply called by adding the combination “yet another” to any word, meaning “one more.” This is how “yet another indexer” appeared - “yet another indexer” or Yandex. I liked this name, especially since it can be deciphered as Language Index. Arkady suggested replacing the combination “ya” with the Russian “ya” to emphasize the focus on the Russian language. This is how Yandex appeared.

Then Artemy Lebedev offered an interesting interpretation: “I” in the word “Index” is translated into Russian as “I”. It turned out to be a kind of “index” in Russian. Already during the operation of the site, users came up with a new decoding with the division of the Internet in the spirit of Eastern philosophy into INDEX and YANDEX. But these two interpretations appeared much later, after Yandex went online. For now, there was only technology that was tied to specific software products.

New Yandex for the new Internet

Even while working on the academic edition of the classics, an algorithm for constructing hypotheses was created. This algorithm made it possible to avoid being strictly tied to the dictionary that was available in the program. And he worked as follows. If during the search process an unfamiliar word comes across, the algorithm analyzes it and predicts the inflection paradigm using an existing dictionary, just as native speakers, having once heard a new term, can use it in various forms.

Then, in 1996, the developers realized that the new technology could be developed and sold independently, without being tied to specific texts. This idea was a very timely solution, since many companies needed similar search systems, and the Internet was gaining momentum in the country. In the fall of the same year, the opportunity arose to show the results of this work.

CompTek took part in the Netcom"96 exhibition, where it presented two new products: Yandex.Dict, which was a layer between a search engine that does not understand Russian morphology and the user, and Yandex.Site, a search engine designed for installation on Internet sites. Over time, the first solution became not very popular, and Yandex.Site, which turned into Yandex.Server, continues to be used today on many resources. A little more time passed, and the Yandex line was supplemented with two new products. This was Yandex.CD, which helps to find. the required document on CD, and Yandex.Lib - a package for developers who need search capabilities for their products.

And on November 25, 1996, Yandex took its first timid step onto the Internet. Anyone has the opportunity to perform a convenient search for Russian-language text using the popular search engine AltaVista. For this, the already mentioned query generation mechanism Yandex.Dict was used. Then it became clear that to create your own search engine, only a small step was needed - indexing Russian-language resources with your own bot. This was a relatively simple task: once the robot was launched, it indexed all available resources, of which there were 5 thousand, which amounted to 4 GB of texts.

At the next exhibition there was an opportunity to show in a favorable light the Yandex-Web solution from CompTek, which is capable of finding everything that is on the network. The yandex.ru resource was opened on September 23, and its presentation took place 2 days later, on September 25, 1997, at the Softool "97 exhibition. The first version of the site with an original “slanted” design was created by Artemy Lebedev (his studio is still working on the external the appearance of Yandex services).

Work for the people

At the same time, it turned out that the new service had outgrown the scope of a simple demonstration of the capabilities of Yandex technology. Regular users began to use it, and the number of requests began to increase rapidly. That is why, after two months, the developers taught the search engine natural Russian. Yandex began to understand not only queries made using logical operators, but also ordinary sequences made up of several words. In addition to this, the new search engine was able to recognize the uniqueness of a document, showing only one copy in the results, and had its own relevance assessment algorithm, which made it possible to obtain among the first links the resources most relevant to the search query.

Already on September 30, i.e. a week after the opening of Yandex-Web, the first “Yandex fairy tale” appeared, a study of the contents of the Russian Internet with some philosophical overtones, and in December it became known that a link to Yandex would appear in the Russian version Internet Explorer 4.0.

During 1998 the number of indexed texts doubled. To maintain performance, the developers partially changed the search engine algorithms. This year the design has been updated and convenient additions have been added. It is now possible to search among the results, as well as see what other users are looking for at the moment. Academic Search, now called Advanced, has two new features: sorting by date and searching for documents within a specific time range. The introduced “find similar documents” option deserves special attention. Users were able to clarify the request simply by clicking on the appropriate link.

1999 can be called the year of Internet development. Then the amount of information and users increased by an order of magnitude, and meanwhile Yandex came in fourth or fifth place in popularity. To better index the sharply increased volume of data, a new robot has been launched. It was created with the aim of effectively filtering spam, and also indexed image captions, descriptions and took into account links much better, which made it possible to introduce search functions for one site and links to a specified resource.

To the already existing regularly published “fairy tales”, reflecting with a slight degree of irony the contents of network resources, was added the Index of Inconstancy of Interests of the Internet Population, abbreviated as NINI-index. From January 1, 1999 to January 1, 2005, weekly summaries were posted reflecting trends in search queries. They represented two top five words, the interest in which over the week most sharply changed towards an increase (“finds”) or a decrease (“losses”). Yandex began to communicate more closely with users: a forum about the search engine appeared and the ability to subscribe to changes in search results for the desired query was added. The new mechanism, called the “citation index,” now ordered resources by importance and popularity, and search in categories made it possible to find information only among sites on a certain topic. A "Family Search" was also introduced to prevent pages with obscene or erotic content from appearing in results.

On December 15, 1999, Yandex and netBridge opened the online auction Molotok.Ru. This was followed by the joint project Narod.Ru, which started on February 15, 2000. Launched under the motto “Build your website in 60 seconds!”, it provided anyone with the opportunity to create a personal page. Soon the companies divided their areas of interest, and Molotok.Ru came under the full control of netBridge, and Narod.Ru became the property of Yandex. The changes that occurred in 1999 finally secured Yandex’s status as a social service and predetermined its further development. In just over two years, Yandex gained recognition and earned consistently high traffic, which became the reason for the changes that took place the following year.

Yandex promotion

The success of the new project predetermined the further history of its development, which required additional resources and assumed a management model that was completely different from that used at CompTek. Since 1999, Arkady Volozh, having chosen the promotion of Yandex as his main occupation, began choosing from many potential partners. It was necessary to find people experienced in corporate construction who would not require a complete transfer of management and would be willing to invest a sufficient amount of funds.

And in the spring of 2000, an extremely important event occurred: an investment agreement was concluded with the company ru-Net Holdings, under which it received a little more than a third of the search engine. Yandex began to exist independently, separating from CompTek, and Arkady Volozh became the general director of the new company. It was not the company's style to receive money and do nothing, so an expansion of staff and a grandiose development of the resource immediately followed.

The design changed for the fifth time, and an “ascetic” version of ya.ru appeared. On the other hand, new services have become available, such as Yandex.Bookmarks, Yandex.News, Yandex.Products, Yandex.Guru and Yandex.Mail. The culmination of innovations was the week of launches of new services that took place in June 2000, which ended with the Yandex holiday. In the fall, the Yandex.Bar toolbar was released. Also, 2000 was the year of the start of a large-scale advertising campaign, for which the slogan “Everything will be found!” was invented, which is still used today. The second advertising campaign, launched at the end of the year, was held under the slogan “All questions to Yandex.”

New Year 2001 Yandex celebrated with the event “New Year’s Appeal of the People of Russia to the President,” in which everyone could take part. All received “letters” were summarized into a single text of the appeal. In mid-February, Yandex settled at a new address, where it acquired its own server room, since new services and an increasing flow of users required an expansion of the hardware base. By the summer, Yandex was able to top the list of the most visited Russian-language resources for the first time in its history.

In 2001, the Open Russian Cup for Internet Search, also called the Yandex Cup, was established. In the first year there were 2 cups, and until 2009 there were 9 cups and a competition between the winners, the so-called Cup Winners' Cup. Like the previous year, Yandex greeted 2002 with a memorable campaign. This time it was dedicated to the introduction of the euro into circulation.

Meanwhile, Runet was developing, and already in the spring the volume of data indexed by Yandex exceeded the landmark threshold of 1 TB. Users now have the opportunity to search for images using Yandex.Images, and in the summer, together with the PayCash group of companies, an electronic payment system Yandex.Money. This was a significant step towards expanding the scope of services provided by Yandex, and had a noticeable impact on the Russian Internet as a whole.

Certain improvements related to filtering unwanted correspondence have affected Yandex.Mail. At the end of 2002, three independent services, Podpiri, Guru and Products, were combined into Yandex.Market, a project that continues to be popular today. This year, the company's management set an ambitious goal - to achieve self-sufficiency. It was decided to build a commercial model on contextual advertising, which made it possible not only to complete the task, but also to do it even before all the expected deadlines. The next stage in the development of Yandex has been completed.

Focus on creativity

In 2003 Much attention was paid to the postal service, which underwent further changes that made it more convenient. These changes continued the following year: Yandex.Mail users received an unlimited mailbox size and a new “Spam Defense” spam filter. Also in 2003, a transition was made to the eighth version of the design. This time, anyone could take part in a two-week test of the new look of the main page and make constructive suggestions. It was slightly modified a year later, and in this form the page existed until 2007.

The Yandex.News service was significantly redesigned, which became an organized collection of the most important news messages, grouped by topic. Photos and videos appeared in the news. The Internet search itself has also undergone changes: RTF, PDF and DOC documents now appear in the results, which has made it easier to find, for example, the necessary documentation, and XML output has been implemented for webmasters. A year later, support for PPT and XLS formats was added, as well as indexing of sites made in Flash.

Meanwhile, international players appeared on the Russian search engine market. They had an equally developed technological base and were serious competitors to Yandex. Runet was becoming closer to the West, which required not only maintaining the quality of the services provided, but radically changing everything for the entire company. This affected not only search: all services required a new look. Yandex managers, accustomed to changes, coped with this task: they managed to expand the staff from 200 to 2,000 people, without turning into a dry corporation, but while maintaining the developed creative style that users loved.

During this time, many new projects were launched, and existing ones received many improvements. Yandex.Maps was opened for users, which was subsequently closely connected with many other services and became one of the priority areas. Yandex.WiFi launched, Yandex.Afisha and other projects were released, many of which were distinguished by their focus on the needs of Russian users. It has become a tradition to hold regional seminars. This approach was correct: the Russian company had undeniable advantages over international competitors, which ensured Yandex’s victory in the Russian market.

At the same time, with timid steps, the company began to expand its geography, so in 2005 a Ukrainian representative office opened.

Time to expand your horizons

Now Yandex is working on two fronts: the company is trying to improve local services and cover the foreign Internet space. In 2007, the Ukrainian version of the yandex.ua search was opened, and 2008 was the year the Yandex Labs division, located in California, was opened. In the same year, Yandex carried out significant work aimed at supporting international Internet standards such as Sitemap, and the GZIP, FOAF and MediaRSS protocols. This made it possible to work more efficiently with indexing not only Russian, but also foreign resources.

In the meantime, there was a noticeable change in the Yandex logo: all the letters became Russian and lost their serifs, gaining a technological look.

In 2009, the Snezhinsk program started, providing users with search results that are most relevant to a specific city when required. On the other hand, in the same year, Yandex became deeply involved in foreign content: it began testing a service that provides translation of found foreign sites, which was released in 2011 under the name Yandex.Translation. In May 2010, users were able to search only among foreign sites by enabling the appropriate option or using the yandex.com domain. Then a search for images and videos was added to yandex.com. Yandex.by and the Tatar version of search started working.

At the same time, the number of local services for Ukraine grew and a regional search appeared, called “Poltava”. It was based on Matrixnet technology, used a year earlier in the Snezhinsk program. The Yandex.Maps service, which has grown significantly over several years, has acquired its own mapping company, GIS Technologies. This is how Yandex came to be in 2011, which became another milestone in the development of the company.

At the very beginning of the year, advertisers were offered a new service - geo-advertising, which offered highlighting organizations on maps and displaying search queries. The Yandex.Fabrika startup investment program was launched, in which not only Russian but also foreign projects were able to take part.

In May 2011, Yandex made an initial public offering on the high-tech NASDAQ exchange, which turned out to be even more successful than expected. They were placed 14% higher than forecast and rose in value by another 42% on the first day of trading. In terms of the volume of funds raised ($1.3 billion) as a result of the initial offering, Yandex took an honorable second place in the list of Internet companies, not surpassing only Google, which earned $1.67 billion in 2004. From this moment begins a new page in the history of Yandex, which has grown from an ambitious project into a huge company, while successfully preserving the unique style loved by millions of users.

The Yandex company (more precisely, the Dutch Yandex N.V.) has published the prices at which it intends to list its shares on the American Nasdaq exchange. The company's capitalization should be $6.4-7 billion, it will offer new shares to the market, and some existing shareholders will sell their securities.

Business publications published this information in today's editions, accompanied by “certificates” about who currently owns Yandex shares. It is a pity that neither the respected Kommersant nor the respected Vedomosti tried to look at least a little critically at the figures reprinted from Yandex documents published on the websites of the exchange and the American Securities Commission.

The fact is that these figures, which supposedly reflect the current distribution of Yandex shares among investors, are quite far from reality. No, Yandex is not deceiving the American authorities, the stock exchange and future IPO participants (he would try). It’s just that the company is a little “cunning”, showing some numbers in a very simple and understandable sign, and completely different ones in a lot of comments and footnotes, typed in small print and written in infuriating “legal” English. The press, naturally, falls for a simple sign and is too lazy to read the fine print. Therefore it represents more detailed review data provided by the company.

Error

In Form F-1, submitted by the company before the IPO, on pages 122-123 there is a plate that indicates the current shareholders of Yandex and their shares. Under this sign are several explanatory footnotes, which actually quite significantly change the idea of the distribution of shares. Let's first look at the picture of this sign:

Notice the two numbers underlined in red. They show the number of Class B shares that Charles Ryan owns and the percentage of those shares in the total number of Class B shares. Based on what is written in the percentage column, Mr. Ryan is one of the largest shareholders of Yandex, having a "weight" more than Mr. Volozh himself, because Class B shares have ten votes each compared to one vote for Class A shares. Sensation? No. In the next column we see that Mr. Ryan controls just 4.06% of the vote - slightly less than Ilya Segalovich and, of course, much less than Volozh.

And literally one line above is Elena Ivashentseva, who “controls” (below we will explain why in quotes) as many as 52 million class B shares or... 24%, almost the same as (allegedly) Mr. Ryan. In both cases we are talking about exactly the same shares of the same class, so the same share should mean the same number of these shares. But Mr. Ryan only has 8.4 million of them.

What's the matter? Let's divide the number of Class B shares of Charles Ryan (8,426,821) by the total number of Class B shares (it is indicated above in the text and is 215,953,241 shares). We get 3.90%. Which is very similar in spelling to 23.90% indicated on the plate.

Simply put, in one of the most important tables of a very important document that Yandex and investment banks prepared for several months, there is blunder. In principle, it can mislead not very attentive investors, which can become a reason for lawsuits against Yandex. Or, according to at least, lead to a serious scandal. By the way, judging by the reaction of the Yandex representative to my message about this fact, I was the first to address this issue to Yandex. The rest either didn’t notice or decided to see what would happen.

But these are minor things compared to what we will see next.

Base and superstructure

Let's read the fine text in the footnotes to the table mentioned above and try to figure out what it means. Please read in the original, in English, so as not to accidentally become a victim of my possibly incorrect translation.

A study of the table and footnotes showed that the cunning investment bankers who compiled this document took into account the same shares several times, representing them as owners of one shareholder, then another. The key owner of Yandex is the group of investment funds Baring Vostok Private Equity Funds. But their share, up to one share, coincides with the share of the partner of these funds, represented on the Board of Directors - Elena Ivashentseva. As far as I understand, the logic of this repetition is that the table first shows the members of the Board of Directors who control (at the decision-making level) this or that block of shares (and votes), and then the companies that formally own the same shares.

Reading the footnotes confirms this hunch. Elena Ivashentseva was simply “attributed” with papers belonging to Baring. And, as we will see later, not only to her.

It turns out that under the banner of Baring Vostok Private Equity Funds there are several companies controlled by different groups of shareholders. The study shows the following structure:

Not bad, right? In this entire complex system, there is only one company whose shares are Yandex N.V. belong directly. Everything else is a “superstructure” designed to hide the real shareholders, but at the same time retain their right to the possible sale of shares and voting rights (this is stated in the footnotes). It is easy to see that even Arkady Volozh holds part of his shares in this structure.

In addition to Volozh, the RuNet Foundation is also of interest in this scheme. He was one of the first “external” shareholders of Yandex, back in almost prehistoric times. But, as we see, he also “put” his Yandex shares into a common “piggy bank” called BC&B Holding.

By the way, another interesting point. In the business press (see, for example, Kommersant) they write “Leonid Boguslavsky’s Runet Holdings.” We see that at least 35.37% of his shares (more precisely, his “grandmother’s” company) Internet Search Investments Limited (ISIL) belong to the companies of the Baring group. Moreover, if we turn to page 112 of the document filed with Nasdaq, we find the following words:

Baring Vostok structured and led the initial investment in Yandex in 2000 by Internet Search Investments Limited (the parent of ru-Net B.V.), in which a Baring Vostok fund is the founder and largest shareholder.

It turns out that ru-Net B.V. (aka ruNet - in the document these names are interchangeable, oddly enough) - is this the structure of Baring’s funds, and not Boguslavsky’s? Or, which is also likely, some of the Baring funds represent the interests of Leonid Boguslavsky too.

What are Baring funds?

If you delve deeper into reading the footnotes to the wonderful tablet, you will discover an interesting thing. A description of what's behind the numbers for Baring's funds says:

Consists of 16,463,739 Class A shares and 52,199,300 Class B shares held as follows:

by BC&B Holdings B.V. (“BC&B”): 13,936,109 Class A shares and 23,801,372 Class B shares;
by ruNet BV: 2,527,630 Class A Shares and 28,397,928 Class B Shares.

BC&B holds a total of 33,913,988 Class B shares and 13,936,109 Class A Shares.

Don't notice anything? Let's remove the unnecessary stuff, leaving only information regarding class B shares (with class A shares everything is more or less clear):

Consists of... 52,199,300 Class B shares held as follows:

by BC&B Holdings B.V. (“BC&B”): ...23,801,372 Class B shares;
by ruNet BV: ...28,397,928 Class B Shares.

The total is exactly 52,199,300 shares. But:

BC&B holds a total of 33,913,988 Class B shares.

Suddenly there is an "extra" 10,112,616 shares that BC&B owns but does not benefit Baring. What kind of shares are these? These are Mr. Volozh’s papers, which he holds not directly, but through the Belka company, which owns a stake in one of the companies of the Baring funds (Strickland). Those. In fact, the distribution of shares within BC&B looks like this:

- Volozh: 0 class A shares and 10,112,616 class B shares;
- Baring funds: 13936109 class A shares and 23801372 class B shares;
- ruNet: 2527630 Class A shares and 28397928 Class B shares.

In total, this structure controls 16,463,739 class A shares and 62,311,916 class B shares. However, the shares owned by ruNet are not the property of BC&B.

Next. Volozh's stake in Strickland (and ultimately BC&B) is 21.10%. What is the share of his shares in the total number of Yandex shares owned by this company? We count: 10112616/(13936109+33913988)=21.13%. Amazing coincidence. It turns out that Strickland’s capital is actually formed from Yandex shares contributed to it by shareholders. The difference is 0.03 percentage points. may be explained, for example, by the fact that a small amount of cash was also contributed to the capital (for minor current expenses) by one of the shareholders.

But if you look at the ownership structure of Strickland shares, it is easy to see that the Baring funds divided their shares of this company into three parts, transferring them to three “paper” offshore companies: BVNL, DDNL and CNL. It is logical to assume that these offshore companies represent the interests of three groups of investors hiding behind Baring structures (similar to Belka, which represents the interests of Volozh).

Mysterious shareholder

What follows is not a statement, but an assumption based on instinct and some logical reasoning, which I will omit here. In my opinion, the BVNL company represents the interests of current and former Yandex employees who have small blocks of class A shares. In addition, there is a feeling that this same company is “hiding” a large block of class B shares, equal to what Arkady Volozh holds in his Belka. Let's try to count.

The 34.30% of Strickland shares owned by BVNL corresponds to approximately 16,412,000 Yandex shares, plus or minus tens of thousands due to rounding errors and possible cash contributions. According to information available today, Baring funds are going to sell 6,242,000 Yandex Class A shares. If we subtract 6,242,000 shares from BVNL's share, we get approximately 10,170,000 shares with an error of several thousand shares. That is, for example, something very similar to 10,112,616 class B shares. It turns out that the BVNL share with very high accuracy (up to tenths of a percent) is divided into two parts: class B shares in an amount equal to what it has in the funds Baring Arkady Volozh, and class A shares in an amount equal to what the funds are going to sell during the IPO.

If you believe in this theory, then it turns out that a large shareholder is “hidden” in BVNL, owning a substantial block of class B shares. That is, shares distributed among the founders of the company and its key long-term investors. And these shares are in the same “package” with employee shares, which suggests that this shareholder is a former or current employee.

Let me emphasize once again that this chapter is not information obtained from any official or unofficial sources, but exclusively speculative reasoning based on logic and mathematics.

Other shareholders

Then everything is simpler and more unambiguous. Footnotes to the table explain the real ownership of shares “recorded” in some investment funds. Let's say that what appears to be owned by Kameson Management Limited, UFG Private Equity Fund II LP and Almaz Capital Russia Fund I LP is actually controlled by a man named Charles Ryan, the former CEO of Deutsche Bank in Russia. In total, it holds approximately 15.5 million shares, of which approximately 8.5 million are Class B shares.

An interesting story with Roth Advisors - one of the largest owners of "prestigious" Class B shares. Behind this company is the family of Carol and Kurt Roth, who live near Chicago. Kurt is an investment banker, but, most likely, Yandex aroused the interest of his wife Carol, a well-known figure in the entrepreneurial movement in the United States. She consults companies on strategic management issues, writes books, appears on TV, and collects dolls (just by the way). And at the same time she invests in some of the companies that turn to her for advice. Yandex probably communicated with her at some point, which was the reason for the purchase of shares in the search engine.

Ben Cole has been one of the company's directors since 2000. He actively invests in Russian high-tech businesses, including projects associated with Arkady Volozh - CompTek and InfiNet Wireless. Robert Harvey Stubblebine, the CEO of this company, is also associated with InfiNet. Otherwise, the relatively large shareholders are mainly represented by various investment funds.

Distribution of Yandex shares before the IPO. Version SuperInvestor.Ru

About 15% of class B shares were never found. Yandex either somehow very successfully hid them in the published data, or simply did not disclose their owners in the document.

Small shareholders

Yandex periodically “rewarded” company employees with its shares. In addition, some of the transactions for the purchase of various businesses that merged into the structure of Yandex went through full or partial exchange shares. Therefore, by now the company has “accumulated” quite a lot (several dozen) of minority shareholders owning fractions of a percent of shares. From the point of view of percentages and votes, this is an insignificant detail. But from the point of view of money, it is a very decent capital. If Yandex lists its shares at least at the lower limit ($6.4 billion), then 0.1% of shares will cost more than $6 million. Who are they, Yandex millionaires?

There is a partial answer to this question in the form provided in Nasdaq. As far as I understand, not all shareholders are there, but the majority. Below you can see this list.

Amilyushchenko Alexey Valerievich - former chief analyst of Yandex, now works at Google;
Andronova Valentina Pavlovna - no information;
Oleg Alekseevich Badera – head of the Yandex.Traffic development company;
Chebunina Elena Vladimirovna - no information;
Dostov Viktor Leonidovich - development director of PayCash ( basic technology Yandex.Money);
Fadeev Mikhail Aleksandrovich - Yandex Director for System Administration;
Felman Dmitry Pavlovich - head of department at CompTek;
Golding Pavel Yurievich - no information;
Ilyinsky Sergey Vladimirovich - group leader at Yandex;
Isaev Artur Alexandrovich - general manager OJSC “Institute of Human Stem Cells”, co-investor in the Yandex.Traffic project;
Ivanov Vladimir Leontievich - no information;
Dmitry Ivanov - Yandex Project Director;
Alexey Mazurov - head of the Yandex development department;
Khutsyan Maria - no information;
Kolmanovskaya Elena Savelyevna - editor-in-chief of Yandex;
Koterov Dmitry - co-founder of the MoyKrug project;
Polozhintsev Ilya Dimitrievich - executive director of Sravni.ru, ex-head of Yandex e-commerce;
Teiblyum Dmitry Mikhailovich - developer at Yandex, one of the oldest employees;
Umansky Ilya - no information;
Tretyakov Alexey - commercial director of Yandex;
Shulgin Alexander is the financial director of Yandex.

The founder of the Yandex search engine, Arkady Volozh, as it turns out, is not its largest owner. They, according to the prospectus issued by Yandex the day before The IPO is Baring Vostok Capital Partners, which invested $5.28 million in the search engine in 2000.

The largest Russian Internet search engine will begin pre-marketing of its initial public offering with a listing on the American NASDAQ exchange early next week. Meetings between the organizing banks and investors will begin on May 3, reports Reuters. The organizers of the placement are Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Revealed the structure

Now this fund is the largest shareholder, its share is 22.6% (23.89% of voting shares), it reported in its prospectus for the IPO. Volozh’s economic share is 14.67% (19.77% of votes), as follows from the prospectus, Segalovich’s is 3.07% (4.14% of votes). The American fund Tiger Global has 20.5% of shares, and UFG has another 5.13% of shares, the document states. The prospectus names Ben Cole, John Boynton, Al Fenoti, Esther Dyson, Alexander Voloshin and Alexander Shulgin as minority shareholders. Former head of the presidential administration Voloshin is on the company's board of directors.

Until now, economic shares only affected the distribution of dividends. It began paying them in 2006, transferring $15 million to shareholders. In 2007, the company paid $10 million in dividends, in 2008 - $19.5 million, and in 2010 - $30 million. If it continues to pay dividends in the future , then holders of shares of classes A and B will receive them in proportion to the number of securities they hold, the prospectus says. However, the company has no such plans yet.

In the first quarter of 2011, revenue amounted to 3.9 billion rubles, profit - 820 million rubles. Almost all revenue came from advertising sales - 3.8 billion rubles. Of these, 3.47 billion rubles. Contextual advertising brought 328 million rubles. - media.

It is worth noting that foreign co-owners of the company may have difficulty increasing their share. Since 2008, Russia has had a law on foreign investment in strategic enterprises, which prohibits foreigners from owning more than 50% of the voting shares of such enterprises, the placement prospectus recalls.

This law does not say anything about Internet companies, but companies that own data encryption technologies automatically fall under its scope, and its 100% subsidiary, Yandex.Money, just recently acquired such a license, the prospectus says. does not rule out that on this basis the parent company may also be classified as a strategic enterprise. The decision on this matter is made by a government commission chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. His press secretary Dmitry Peskov is not aware of plans to include him in the list of strategic companies.

In November 2010, the IPO was conducted by the Internet holding Mail.ru Group of Yuri Milner and Alisher Usmanov. The company was placed at the upper end of the price range and was valued by investors at $5.7 billion. Previously, Usmanov had negotiated the purchase of a stake in, but they did not lead to a deal. Mail.ru Group shares on the LSE yesterday fell by 3.3% to $30.7 per share.

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