Yandex SuccessStory

Can you imagine Google having a rival? It does have one this comes as a surprise to many. Yandex is one of Russia’s top Internet giants and can be considered as Russian version of Google. Arkady Volozh started out as a humble tradesman, but deep in his heart he knew trade wasn’t what he was meant to do. He was fascinated with programming and the Yandex is a top player today, all due to his determination to make it big.

Arkady Volozh was a young mathematician. The story of Yandex began in Moscow in 1980s when Volozh and his colleagues purchased computers from Western Europe and decided to sell them in the Soviet Union. They purchased sunflower seeds in Russia, sold them in Austria and purchased computers. They later brought back computers to Russia and sold for a higher price. They were quite successful, but Volozh had bigger ideas in mind. He founded a company with a friend called CompTek which would design computer programs. This company would later go on to become “Yandex”. Volozh and his friend concentrated on inventing new methods of searching for data through large amounts of information.

At that time, there were already many search engines. But these engines were based on the rules of English Grammar and did not take into account other languages. Volozh together with his friend developed Russian search engine which was called Yandex. This name is basically a combination of two words “Ya” (which means ‘I’) and “Index”. Together it meant ‘my index’ or ‘index for me’.