Yandex was created by
Ilya Segalovich and
Arkady Volozh while working for Arcadia in 1993. It was named Yandex as an abbreviation for Yet Another Indexer. They named it Яndex, using
Я as a shortened version of Ya. Yandex was unveiled on September 23, 1997. At that point it had indexed the entirety of the Russian internet. The following year, Yandex began showing advertisements. Their first advertisement said, "Ваша киска купила бы Cisco," meaning, "Your kitty would buy Cisco." In the year 2000, Yandex was registered as a company. Volozh became the CEO. In 2001, Yandex started to place advertisements directly into pages themselves. 2500 advertisers joined. A year later, the company became profitable. That same year, Yandex.Images and Yandex.Market started. Later that year, Yandex.money (a payment system) started jointly with the PayCash group. In 2003, Yandex started issuing dividends. That year, they issued $100,000 of dividends. Yandex also changed their advertisement system to a
pay-per-click model. In 2004, Yandex.Maps started. They had detailed maps of
Moscow,
Saint Petersburg, and
Kyiv. It could not be used to search for addresses, just establishments. That year, Yandex created a separate search engine for blogs, that no longer exists. == Market share ==