In a fascinating ‘fireside chat’ type interview, Ilya Segalovich was interviewed about Yandex’ development.
In a frank exchange, Segalovich revealed that the name was originally an abbreviation for ‘Yet another Index’, and the motivation for building it was that there was no alternative – in the early 19990s the Internet didn’t exist in the state it is now, and the developers didn’t see huge market for it. Their first product was used by 100 people – Segalovich was both engineer and customer support.
There was no shopping index in Russia – the founders tried to make “something beautiful” to help.

