History of Yandex

Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh thought up the word “Yandex”. Arcadia had launched a new version of a search program and they wanted to give it an original name. Ilya sat down with a sheet of paper and wrote down words that described the essence of the program, brainstorming around the words “search” and “index”. That’s how the word “Yandex” appeared: an abbreviation of “yet another indexer”. Arkady suggested replacing the first two English letters with the Russian letter Я (“Ya”). As a result, the program came to be named Яndex.

Arcadia became part of the computer and software supply company CompTek. A few years later, CompTek would become a founder of another company — Yandex.