September 23, 2017 at 19:31

20 years of Yandex. Lecture by Ilya Segalovich - the person who invented this word

    Exactly 20 years ago - September 23, 1997 - Yandex appeared on the Internet. Arkady Volozh, Ilya Segalovich, Elena Kolmanovskaya presented Yandex.ru search engine at the Softool exhibition. They opened it by cutting the ribbon in front of the computer - because they did not understand how to open sites on the Internet.

    Then it consisted of 5 thousand sites, which posted about 4 gigabytes of text. People approached the demo computer, tried to ask questions, and received answers. At that time, Yandex took into account the morphology of the Russian language, the distance between words and was able to rank documents.


    This is one of the last lectures delivered by iseg , Ilya Segalovich, co-founder and first technical director of Yandex. It is dedicated to the history of Yandex from the moment Ilya and Arkady Volozh sat down at the school for one desk. The quality of the lecture recording is not as good as we would like, but the content is priceless.

    - My name is Ilya Segalovich, Yandex. I went to school with my friend Arkasha. We weren’t spilling water, we sat at the same desk for four years, got gold medals and we went to act. Neither he nor I did what they wanted, but we lived side by side, met and played badminton. We had such a hobby. I brought a net to his yard all the time. I had a book with funny drawings. We ourselves have learned and taught twenty people around us. We regularly held powerful badminton battles, so this badminton line continued at our institute.

    This was an occasion for us to meet, because our hostels were nearby: he was on Volgin, and I was on Miklukho-Maklaya. This is the south-west of Moscow. In general, not far, and there are small forests. There was a big badminton zone. Now I don’t know, everything has already been built there. We played and continued to be friends, although we already studied at various institutes. Then the revolutionary period began, the cooperative movement, and he tells me at some point - we played badminton, and he says: “Listen, I'm leaving my institute and I'm going to do business.” I say: “Have you lost your mind at all? Where to? Here the whole story is understandable: it is necessary to work, to do what the boss ordered, and you are somewhere in your business. ”

    It was perceived simply as absolute madness. On the other hand, such an age - in general, there is nothing to lose. Not that I tragically took it all, but after a year I came to him and said: “Listen, you don’t have work to program for me?” He says: “Come on, come on.” I connected, and the work that I came to earn extra money - it turned out to be quite interesting, and then so interesting that it captured my whole life. The work was related to the manufacture of search engines for IBM PC computers.

    Then we had the first product. It was called the “International Classification of Inventions for Patentists”. There were seven such thick books that no normal person could completely read or even memorize or learn, but they had to quickly navigate and find the necessary rubrics. We did all this, in my opinion, on ten floppy disks, and this began my working career in this company: I was engaged in formatting floppy disks. This is not the most intellectual activity. Why didn’t I program? There was a funny story. I come to him and say: “Come on.”

    It was still a period when I was not really looking for work, I had money under contracts. We really did something useful at our old work, and there was some money. Literally in one evening, I programmed literally everything that he wanted, but somehow he forgot about me, found some other guys, and after nine months we meet him again. I say: “What are you not calling? Where is your job? ” He says: "Sorry, we already programmed everything, but come, you will program floppies." That's about how I ended up programming floppy disks. Then I realized that formatting floppy disks is very difficult, and most importantly, there are a lot of them. It was necessary to somehow reduce their number. Then I looked at what they were recording there. I realized that this is impossible, it is necessary to compactly compress data.

    In general, the guys are great, they wrote everything, but there was still a long way to the right algorithms. I cheerfully rushed to this matter and reduced the amount of work that I had to do, that is, instead of writing one program on ten floppy disks, I managed to reduce everything to three or four. This freed up a tremendous amount of time, and you could do something more useful. I imagine how happy I was then. Now it is difficult to remember, but, in general, it was nice. At the same time, the program began to take up less space, and in general the requirements for it decreased, but this is purely engineering pleasure.

    It is also related to the fact that I tried to self-educate. I came across, for example, some English journal, I learned it from cover to cover. There was such a magazine, and there just came across an article about data compression. I took this article. There was no program, everything was said in words, but I directly implemented everything, as it was written there, and it worked.

    Everything went further, and then we had a period of crisis, associated with the fact that the Soviet organizations, which were the main buyers of our system, they collapsed all together in 1992, 1993, 1994. It became so bad that they stopped buying. In general, they ceased to engage in production and from here they stopped buying what is needed for production. They began to lease premises, they began to engage in barter and so on. A very difficult economic time has come throughout the country, which I am not inclined to denigrate even once. In general, I think that this is stupid, from my point of view, the nineties. But I remember that there was a lot of confusion, but somehow it quickly returned to normal, and people began to perceive themselves normally.

    I wanted to say that it was a very difficult period, and our project collapsed along with the economy associated with patenting. The Soviet Union ceased to patent, and such an acute moment came. We continued to sell this program, but of the five or six people who were involved in the project, two or three remained. Arkady, seeing that everything was bad, rushed to deal with computers, hardware, and he called me, and he called other guys. Nevertheless, the small department that remained from the half-crushed company of the late eighties and early nineties still existed by the mid-nineties. We began to think what to do such that, maybe, not to earn money, but to sound somehow.

    The first thing that occurred to me then, I say: "Let's do something eternal." It is clear that we were able to search and well searched in terms of understanding the language. And it was necessary to take some kind of Russian text that was definitely eternal, that is, one that people will always use and have always used. The first thing that comes to mind is War and Peace. But what to look for in it? This is not an informational guide.

    Do not forget that in the early nineties the feeling and perception of religion and everything religious was completely different from what it is now. Now it is very dual. There are people who are very strongly in favor, and there are people who are very strongly against. Then religion, after many years of persecution, was perceived as an offended, unhappy branch of culture, and all people who considered themselves cultural, in a sense, were obliged to help.

    You can always find the offended and somehow try to help them internally. Now, too, there are sections of the population with whom one can somehow sympathize internally. Then the believers were people who needed to sympathize. Plus, there were people who were believers, and somehow it all came together, and we did such a thing called the Bible Computer Reference. We took the Bible, digitized it, put a lot of work. I met with the Russian Bible Society. I met people who made the Brussels edition. I know the story of the publication of the Bible. I know who translated which chapter.

    It’s very interesting, in general, I can give a whole lecture, but the point is that for me it was an immersion in the topic, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it was necessary to make a good product that would be secular, neutral, universal, and with this would be perceived by religious people solely as positive and charitable. We managed to do such a thing in 1994, and in 1995 we started to sell it very inexpensively, although at that time, maybe it was expensive - $ 40, in my opinion, if I'm not mistaken. This is quite a lot at the time, but after this patent story ended, for us it was the only source of income.

    We made a very beautiful cover. We had many volunteers who helped in this project. There was a wonderful person who was doing a symphony at that time. It was such a synodal edition, when a pointer is made to each word, where this word occurs in the text of the Bible. The people who made the symphony helped. They read, corrected, that is, everything is cool there. We also tried to make the search work well, that everything was instantly right. The cars were old - AT and XT computers.

    We had such a test. It was called the "cat test." I did this: I just took and threw a book on the keyboard. It was necessary to ensure that the program was all adequate, not to fall, so that it was possible to put pressure on the down arrow and that scrolling of some endless lists would occur at such a speed that the person did not feel any delays. The search should have been in a second. All this had to be done somehow, so that it was pleasant to use it.

    The result is pretty nice. We sold a thousand copies. This is a crazy amount - $ 40,000. She came to us for a very long time, probably two or three years, but as a result, they did not expel our group from CompTek, from this company that was engaged in hardware, although all the preconditions for this were because the accountant was always paid a salary, she looked at us and thought: “What are these loafers doing here?” The company makes money, it sells hardware, and these incomprehensible programmers are sitting here, programming and selling for a pretty penny.

    Nevertheless, we paid for ourselves and got the audacity to take another order, because the product turned out to be so pretty that the Institute of World Literature and the Informregister came to us - such was the organization that the state commissioned to record all Russian classics on CD-ROMs. And here we are with our rather high-quality product. Naturally, they came to us, and this order passed us. There were still competitors, there was a tender. We were the best, and as a result of this order, we doubled or triple the team. This gave us the opportunity, firstly, to breathe somehow, and secondly, CompTek moved to a place where there was a permanent Internet connection. It was August 1995, but it is important that the Internet was constant and fast.

    - My name is Lisa. I am from Krasnoyarsk. I have two questions. You may not answer them immediately, but according to the logic of your story, because they are not related to history. First question: what problems do you have at the present stage of development of search engines? Second question: please tell us, then, about the Yandex management school.

    - Good. I think that maybe someone is here who will do it more professionally than I do, because I have given a lecture twice in this school, I will now read it a third time, but I have not prepared it. I approximately know how many people study there, but I don’t know all the specifics and all the details.

    Of the three programmers, we have six. It was an explosion, just fantastic, in fact, and they gave us the Internet. Not dial-up - do you know dial-up? (Depicts the sound of the connection - approx. Ed.) Does anyone remember that, right? Not dial-up, but just a normal cable, Ethernet. True, Ethernet was still coaxial then, but it was already switched to Ethernet, so the period was such a transition. Well, Ethernet was coaxial, and now Ethernet is over RJ45. In general, twisted pair is called. Generally speaking, I want to note the following - that we don’t need to perceive us as people who are completely “dummies,” doing something on their knees. We were always inspired by very ambitious plans and tasks.

    First of all, we always saw what is around. I had a complete set of similar western tools of local search engines for a computer. I had a biblical western product. Even three, in my opinion, I looked at when I did. We felt at the forefront. Everything that we did, we always did not according to the Hamburg account, as they say, that is, we did not give ourselves any discounts. We had favorite western products and had unloved western products.

    We sought to do the right thing, that is, we sought to make it perfect in terms of user experience, in terms of quality, the pleasure of owning a product, and so on. Even when we did not deal with the Internet, and were engaged in local products, we still set the maximum requirements for ourselves. When we connected to the Internet, I remember, somewhere around that time I discovered such a system - AltaVista. They closed three days ago. In general, probably no one paid attention to this news, but people who have been on the Internet for a long time - at that moment, a mean tear rolled down.

    Viewer:
    - Artem, the city of Tyumen. Tell me, after the closure of this project in the Bible, then did you have any motivation? Do you want to earn money, become famous, become Internet gods or become famous only in Moscow?

    Ilya:
    - Firstly, it was very shameful to give up what we started, that is, I wanted to make a good local search engine, and it was somehow very shameful to take in the middle. Therefore, they definitely twisted it to be good. The second - when we went online, and I looked at AltaVista, and there were some other systems there, we realized that, in fact, we can do the same and even better. The feeling that we can do better, the feeling that it is bad, but we know how, and we can do better, was very spiritual.

    There was an acute desire. Then, frankly, we did not understand at all what kind of business it would be, in general, where it would all go, how people would earn on the Internet. It was absolutely obscured by the darkness, but there was a feeling that we could do it, and it would be better than what it is now, and it will be used. At least, we will begin to use it ourselves, because we always ate our own food, that is, we always used the product itself.

    We never made custom products. All the products that we did, we did for ourselves. We made them all the time and used them ourselves. I probably used this Bible the most. I quoted her so much and so on, that is, I remember her very well. With the Internet there was the same feeling, but the Internet was then small, and it seemed that the Internet was there, you think, so to speak, it was downloaded to the hard drive. So it was.

    Viewer:
    - Were there moments when you thought that nothing works, and in principle, what you are doing now, it will not bear fruit in the end, and you will be left with nothing? Second moment. Did you or your team members have a transitional moment when you were offered to leave for another company, paid more salary there than you earned? Was there such a moment - just leave and get paid there?

    Ilya:
    - I would note two such points in the nineties. Firstly, around 1993-1994, when we had not yet connected to the Internet, we still did not have a Bible, and our old products had already burned out and we had to somehow survive. We literally got hooked on making this Bible. This saved us a year or two.

    The second point is about 1996, when business really went uphill before the crisis, and our parent company made very good money, and we against them, despite the fact that we paid for ourselves and received these orders, were still not perceived by such stepsons very understandable and not very necessary. There was a rather acute moment, rather, it was more psychological: is it necessary to do this at all? But will it bring the necessary income? But can we even somehow pay for ourselves so as to expand?

    Do not just pay for the five or six people who are sitting. Anyway, they are sitting in the parent company, the parent company provides some kind of infrastructure. There are so many aspects that say "free bread." There were also some rather sharp moments. I would single out about two thousandth year when we received investments. How to do it? It was a very hot moment.

    We could completely sell ourselves, as Aport or Rambler did, and with them, in general, a tragic story happened in the sense that, having changed the team, the owners could not give birth to a sense of ownership. We made the only right decision: we sold a third, and sold to investors who seemed to us the most sane, that is, they clearly did not want to break us. They did not want complete control. They gave us money and entrusted them to us, that is, they entrusted us with the future of our company. This, oddly enough, is a rather rare quality among investors.

    Usually, if investors give money, especially in Russia, they say: now we will command and say what to do and what not to do. It was a very delicate moment.

    There was one more moment - around 2002-2003, when we emerged from this minus, when we burned investor money. The Internet then earned very little, but we learned to live on self-sufficiency. It was a pretty sharp point. For about three years we did not grow at all or almost did not grow. When we received the money, investments, we recruited about a hundred people per year, and we were at this level for about two or three years, at least until 2004.

    We did not grow. We have grown by fifty in four years. Maybe more after all - probably every two or three years. It was such a purely economic story: how to emerge, which model to build from the point of view of advertising on the Internet, how to switch to an optional model. This was also an acute moment, around 2003. Because we were selling ads on impressions, and we had to switch to a click model, on the one hand, and on the other, lower prices so that people could turn on at the lowest levels - one cent, in my opinion, was worth a click.

    It was a terrible risk, because we earned. We have somehow climbed to zero. We understand that somehow we live and there is some growth, but here we just had to jump headlong into the pool and fall back into the negative. It was very difficult to do. Firstly, it was impossible to do quickly. Imagine that you decided to commit suicide, but not just spontaneously. We met, agreed, and under the pressure of some boss they all rushed headlong into the pool. This is one story. This is more or less explainable. We are watching the news. There, some sects periodically do this, but this is a spontaneous decision, and in our case it was necessary to decide on suicide and methodically work on this suicide project for six months by a large team of people.

    It was very difficult. We had to believe that this suicide would not actually kill us, but would raise us to another level. On the other hand, it was necessary to focus and do it. When we did this and started, the money fell. You see, in the first month they collapsed. We had such ad revenue, and it fell. We went negative again, but very briefly, and the belief that this will work, the belief that this is the right model, the belief that this should be done already, she was already with us, and we rushed all together into this whirlpool, and literally in three or four months we climbed out again to the old level and then we went on at some terrible speeds, leaps and bounds.

    As for leaving for another company - indeed, there was an acute moment with investing, when it was necessary to decide whether we really want to sell the business. This was not exactly then, there was no desire to sell the business, but there was a desire to take over the world in the good sense of the word. This desire materialized in the fact that we did not sell the company. There was still such a moment: it was possible to get money from the parent company. Our parent company was ready to give money, not to let us go for free bread, but to leave us part of CompTek and continue the same thing that we did, only more successfully. We hoped that we would come out, etc.

    I believe that Arkady showed tremendous wisdom. He convinced me and all of us that it was wrong, because it was like taking money from parents all the time. You can take money from your parents, but if you are starting your own business, it’s better to take it all the same in a place where you will feel full adult responsibility. It will discipline you. This will immediately build your relationship with the outside world, put on the right track. It was a very important moment. I don’t remember who came to us and offered money, but these were those who bought Aport and Rambler. You can open the story and read who bought them. They also came to us.

    It was also important not to fall into the sin of getting into the pocket of your dad. We have not fallen into this sin. We limited ourselves absolutely consciously, and it was a very wise step, because we dried out, counted money very much. All the money we received for the investment, we spent very focused. I remember there was a brilliant idea. There should have been an increase in the cost of advertising on TV in early 2000, and we managed at the old price to be the first in the history of the Russian Internet, perhaps even throughout Eastern Europe, to advertise an Internet project on television.

    After that, for ten or eight years we were not advertised on television, but there was a time in 2000 when we released an ad that was impromptu . There Theme Lebedev starred, very funny.

    It was literally such an explosion. First of all, people did not understand what it was. They watched what the Internet is, and there is some other thing on this Internet called Yandex. Not only is there somewhere the Internet, but there is still Yandex. It was such an incomprehensible thing in the square, but it was funny, incomprehensible and cool. Advertising was not meaningless in fact. This was our first major waste of investment money.

    The second piece, which was significant for us: we moved to a good office, compact. It was one room actually. It was a large hall, the former hall of the Exhibition Center of the Academy of Sciences, about the size of this room, and in the middle we let out a balcony. The balcony went right in a circle, rather large, and people were also sitting on it, and the middle was so empty, and it turned out to be like one room. We did not make two floors of it. We left one such mono space. About a hundred people sat there. We started from seventy and then to one hundred and twenty matured. And we continued to sit in this room, in this engine room.

    It was necessary, for example, to make some announcement - we went out in the middle, and the guys were sitting there, the aquarium was so funny. Called technical support. They responded to outraged letters from users. People write: “Why does Yandex.Mail not work for me for an hour? Why do I have files on the People? We then had the People, Mail, News, search. In general, many different, and the guys answered these letters.

    We always saw what they were doing. There was a very fun company of young guys who cheerfully answered letters from users. When it was necessary to make an announcement, we went to such an aquarium, and someone shouted “birthday” or something else, everyone hung from the balconies, congratulated. Or, if it was necessary to make a speech, they listened to the speech. In general, everything was very direct and great, romantic. For about four years we sat there, maybe a little more.

    What else is so interesting to tell? We are approaching the most important: the future of mankind, the Internet and search engines. Let's talk a little more about history - not about the future, but just about the sweat and blood of our business, about what we actually do. When in 2000 we took a chance and took investments, started the company, we also had a choice. We did not know how to approach at all. Option A - it was possible to maintain focus on the search and do nothing else, to remain such a purely search engine. But we understood that a completely different business was going on around us, people were gaining an audience with classroom projects.

    Firstly, hosting sites, mail, auctions and so on. There was a fairly large set of services: news, shopping, products. And all these services were quite resource-intensive, on the one hand, and on the other hand, we did not have experience in their manufacture. Still, the team that we assembled was very algorithmic, it was about working with big data. She was about making artificial intelligence. In some ways, I also relate myself to this company, although I have never had the appropriate education. But I always had the audacity to consider myself a mathematician - perhaps because I once won the All-Union Mathematics Olympiad. Further, I didn’t study very hard at the university, but I didn’t have the audacity to do so, and, in general, I always considered myself a mathematician.

    Therefore, somehow it happened that I had people in the team who finished the mechmath, the Naval Forces, and I led them all impudently. Not that he directed - the word "directed" does not fit. Communicated, as it were. That is, I understood them, they understood me. Suffice it to say that so far no one has been fired from the original team, no one has left. We are a very close-knit and friendly team for many years. This is a basic four to six people. We are still all in Yandex, already 12-15 years old. We have such an internal site: staff.yandex-team.ru. It has a date of employment, and people are proud. Someone has a date of employment - 1992, that is, Yandex still did not exist, there was nothing at all, and people already worked on this project.

    Spectator:
    - And in what year Yandex? ..

    Ilya:
    - It was born around 1993, the name is Yandex. By the way, about twenty years ago. There was such an order from Arkasha, because before that we had this directory of inventions, there was still some kind of directory. The result was a new version of the search that I already did, and it was just very efficient, compact, very fast, and allowed us to do things that we could not do before - technologically, from the point of view of search. Arkasha says: “Such a cool thing happened. Come up with a name. ”

    When I come up with something, I usually have such a long list of options, otherwise it’s not interesting. He comes in the morning. I rarely traveled then. I lived in the city of Pavlovsky Posad. It is very far away. I didn’t always go there, often stayed overnight in the office. There were several more people like me, that is, it was normal then. He comes in the morning, and I say so sleepy: “Look.” On the first sheet was Yandex. He says: “Oh, what you need. Let's just remake the first letter so that it is Russian, and everything else is Latin. ” I say: "Come on."

    We did so, and for a long time we had such a name. Why is it so called - uninteresting, it's all written everywhere. But it’s important that when in 2000 we decided to do services and start something that we didn’t know how to do, it was also for us such a jump into the water or into the pool. It was scary, but we understood that it was impossible to do without it, because it would allow us, firstly, to learn how to do something, and secondly - to do services for an audience that is not covered by the search, which also requires certain services etc. Although we were not sure that we would do it best of all.

    A team of hardcore C ++ programmers who spent their entire lives solving algorithmic problems on a server wrote on FreeBSD, on UNIX, although we all had a Windows background, so we cannot say that we had Windows (inaudible - approx. Ed.) very big. I really apologize for saying technical things, but maybe someone understands. Therefore, we had a repository that immediately compiled on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows. This was instituted in 1996 and is still the case, that is, up to now, most of our code helps us to make it very high-quality, compact, well-compiled, it allows us to find errors, and so on. And then Windows allows it to be debugged well.

    It was such a bunch of hardcore C ++ programmers, algorithmists - and here you need to create some kind of PHP nightmare: narod.ru, something else. It was some kind of completely uncomfortable thing for us, but I had to step over ourselves. I believe that here the first violin was played again by Arkasha. He just took some good guys, managers. In fact, the first manager was the guy who made 1C for CompTek. He says: "Dima, let's be a manager and do this to us quickly, this and this, and this is in PHP." "Yes, let's do".

    We hired the guys with great speed and figurated quickly, which means that the people are unhappy, and it turned out that it didn’t turn out so badly. Then everything is rather painful, because these two cultures of different coding and different life have existed for a long time in many respects. It was rather difficult for us to combine these cultures - a culture of hardcore programming and non-search, service programming. Now everything is so intertwined and so complex tasks are everywhere, so complex tasks in Mail, in Yandex.Disk and in other services that I would not like to somehow lower or elevate people from different parts of Yandex. We are now largely a united team, but once such a division was very noticeable.

    Another important point. Maybe due to the fact that from the very beginning we were aimed at a fuse going from understanding data, from some complex algorithmic things, from very highly efficient systems, we always perceived ourselves at a very high level. We have always perceived ourselves as a team that can do all the same or better than our competitors on a global level. AltaVista was able to search in billions or millions of documents, and we knew how to search in millions of documents, but she did not know how to search with an understanding of the Russian language, but we knew how, and that was our advantage, which we used for quite some time and successfully.

    Until approximately 2006-2007, we had no competitors in this sense. Firstly, we had a fast-working and high-quality service with a large index, and on the other hand, we understood the language, which no Western competitor understood, and it took Google quite a few years before it implemented all the same that was implemented in Yandex, but now the situation has greatly leveled off, and we cannot say that Yandex has any advantages in this. But advantages are not a static thing, that is, nothing can be done, and then rest on their laurels. Everything that you do will be instantly achieved and surpassed. Therefore, the advantage is movement. The advantage is constant work, this is the constant appearance of new things.

    Secondly, she, too, is a little about drama, about a change in consciousness. When we started in 2000 as an independent company, our investors were Western funds. In general, Baring Vostok Capital Partners is a fund founded in the mid-nineties. There are formally two leaders, an astronaut: Stratford and Leonov. They met at Soyuz Apollo. This fund is status. There, basically, in my opinion, English money, American money, Russian money, it’s mixed up there. Normal successful fund. They have existed in Russia for twenty years. Mostly shipping companies were engaged, something else there, millet, grain.

    I am not going to investigate the activities of this wonderful company, but the group of people who works with us are very nice people, because they definitely didn’t interfere with us, and they always came up with positive things. They did not try to capture us, to change our policy, but just such normal competent financial investors. When they came to us, they said: "Guys, we will all do clean, white, white salaries." Then the salaries were very small, and it didn’t matter whether they were white or not. The programmer’s salary was $ 600. It wasn’t a lot of money, but we decided that we should do everything white, somehow agreed internally to this and supported it.

    At our place, very early, even before many Russian companies, everything became completely white, transparent, fluffy, and in many respects it determined our decision when in 2000, right at the start, to all the founders of the company, there were twelve people who time were already members of our team - we all gave a small piece of Yandex. Then it was perceived as a beautiful, pretty candy wrapper that does not mean anything, which could somehow be counted in the value of the company.

    The value of the company is known. I remember my candy wrapper was worth $ 100,000. That was a lot. It could not be realized, it could not be sold, and it hung nailed somewhere on the wall. It was very cool to feel like such a rich person. Theoretically, for two whole years it was possible to live on this money. In general, great, pleasant feeling. But nothing specifically meant that. Three or four years later, when our options were fulfilled ... and we had four-year options, they are now four-year-olds, such a standard practice. It was somehow set right away, and now all Russian startups, too, in my opinion, give out four-year options, such a tradition. It is believed that a person must work for four years, and then receive.

    Options are granted, they are usually exercised starting from the first year. It is important that after about four years the initial group of people was completely draped over, everyone got options. We began to think what to do next, and the team had already grown, it already had 130 people. We began to think: "We must give out to the second group, it is time." It was also such a dramatic moment when we came to the guys and said: "Guys, let us give you an option now." "And what is it? What for?" All in all, it was a very strange thing. It was such a thing about a club entry. You enter the club of the elite with us.

    About ten or twenty percent of the companies around us were covered by the option program - these are the people who are the most important, burning. We have the head of hostesses with options, the secretary of our options is not the point. It is important that these were the people who defined the company, that is, those about whom we could say that without them the company would be different, without them the company would be with different eyes and with a different feeling. This was our conscious step. Very early — I think that, at least before many Russian companies — we began to do this thing, and constantly, every year, every six months they issued it, tried to maintain it at about 10-15% of the company.

    Imagine the surprise of our employees when Yandex went public. Nobody sold anything in practice. Holders of a large number of shares sold a little before the IPO, just to move to another apartment, for example, but when the IPO happened in 2011, and it turned out that Yandex had 120 millionaires, it was a shock in a way for everyone . People came up to me. I remember that Sasha came up to me and said: “Ilya, you know, I want to tell you one thing. Remember, you gave me in 2005? ” I say yes". “After all, I took this completely ... You know, I would like to say, I'm shocked.” The feeling of this club, a team of loved ones.

    This piece of paper, which meant nothing, about which nothing could be understood. There was no business, in 2003 we were in the red. It was just the Fellowship of the Ring. I am very glad that we continue. Now this team has grown, we have 5,000 people, but the story about these pieces of paper, which people perceived as something abstract, incomprehensible, inspires a lot of people. Well, not even people, but just somehow warms, creates the right feeling. When we handed out, it was not about money at all, because it was impossible to understand how much it would cost, nor how much it costs now. It was just such an act of friendship.

    Viewer:
    - There is a stereotype that making a career in the IT sphere is practically impossible for a girl. Is it so?

    Ilya:
    - I think that there is a stereotype, but somehow it turned out that there is no stereotype. I am generally an inadequate, normal person. I have no sexism or feminism in my head at all. I do not understand anything in this sense. I believe that there are business qualities, and that’s it. If we talk about statistics, then in Yandex there are really fewer programmers than programmers. Probably the same in any, but this is such a historical reality.

    However, there are very successful programmers. For example, Olya, who did everything for us, was responsible for all our sorcerers for many years. Now, however, she left the company, I hope, temporarily, due to the birth of a child, but it is important that there were very significant things that were done specifically by girls-programmers. Our head of the layout group was and is Nadia. Now she somehow, too, after the birth of the child is less involved in all of this, but it is important that there are several key points where the technical part was done by the girls.

    Second moment. I don’t want to draw some kind of watershed here and say: this is so, and this is so. It’s just that if you observe the picture and look at it purely statistically, you can see that there are a lot of successful female managers, especially in the technical background, that is, the girls start as programmers, and then it turns out that when it is necessary to find a compromise, bring the matter to an end, clinging to this plan, this task and bringing it to explain to people, gather people and resolve the conflict, it turns out that girls deal with this noticeably better than boys. Then there was Thatcher's joke, in my opinion: if you want to be said, trust the man, and if you want to be done, trust the woman.

    I have no internal differences. So it is for Arkasha, and for most of the guys who have been in the company since the foundation. For us, there is no such separation, but an objective, statistically noticeable bias: there are a lot of female managers and fewer programmers. If we talk about the option program, are there any millionaire girls? Yes, there are multimillionaires. How many female directors do we have? Lena, Zhenya Zavalishina, Katya Fadeeva, lawyer. In general, there are one third of the girls in our iconostasis, so everything is fine. The iconostasis - this is our page where there are photos of company executives.

    Viewer:
    - Good evening! I am Eugene from MSTU. In fact, we are taught a lot to communicate and perceive ideas and innovations - such a very fashionable word. I would really like to learn about the innovations that are in Yandex, about what you are doing really better than many. I know some of them, but it seems to me firsthand it would be more interesting to hear, especially since you have been at the forefront of services for 15 years.

    Ilya:
    - The story is such that we at least the first two-thirds of our lives - and maybe even half - did not look back or developed without looking back at the existing Western systems. Until 2007, we had nothing to worry about. Everything we did was absolutely hassle-free. It was perceived by a grateful audience, because Western systems were practically not present here, and this is good. This greatly liberated us, because we made such services that we would never have done if we thought about repeating something for someone.

    I can give an example of a service, which, maybe, some of you often use, and others less often, but you probably heard. Yandex Market. Once we started with a very crazy idea about which it was unclear whether or not it would work: to take and aggregate all the electronic commerce of Russia in the format in which we then proposed. At the same time, it was necessary to build relations with services so that they would transfer their data to us and receive something in return, because the alternative would be to choose the path that Western systems chose.

    No one went or almost no one went our way. They all went this way: “Let's just in a hostile way download all the content from some store, aggregate this content in this way and start providing this kind of service.” In our case, we immediately somehow chose a very fine line of how to combine relationships with partners and at the same time build a service that would be useful, possessed sufficient completeness and quality. Plus there was an idea from the very beginning, based also on hardcore C ++ programming. There was a group of guys who said that we will now make you artificial intelligence about the choice of goods.

    In general, we always shot this way. I can’t say that we have a super-successful project, but we had such a system, and now it is called “Guru”, which asks you questions in a natural language, and when you answer them, you choose the model you need. It was our such a strong point. It was such a unique service that, in general, no one in the West had. Plus, we constantly learned how to build relationships with partners so that partners would receive value from us, would receive a plus from us. And as a result, if you look at these 12 years of development, then everything that is on a Russian scale in the framework of Yandex.Market is an absolutely unique service. There is nothing similar either in scope — that is, we have 99% of all electronic commerce in Russia — neither in terms of service quality, nor in the quality of model descriptions, nor in the convenience of work.

    It's just that nobody has this model as a business model, this product as a business product that pays off at the same time, does not spoil relations with partners who block it, as happened in the West with a huge number of such innovative services, and at the same time does good service for people - no one did such a thing. Our perseverance, we absolutely did not look back. We absolutely did not see how this is arranged around. If we looked - Yahoo did so, let's do it too - then nothing would have worked, just nothing would have worked.

    A similar story with Yandex.News, a similar story with many other services that we did later and now, thinking primarily about the current situation in this market and about this audience. A good example is Yandex.Taxi. The situation has ripened. Google does not have this service - not because they do not know how to do it, but because there is a different model. GetTaxi or Uber, who saw how it works, there they have a different relationship. They also cannibalize taxis, they do not work with taxis. They go directly to the driver, that is, the driver puts himself such an offer and receives orders.

    This will not work here in Russia. Firstly, drivers are not so advanced. You can find a lot of reasons. We have guys who do this service — they tell me better and understand better than me why this is so, but the fact remains: we managed, at least so far, very on time, very accurately in time and in quality to make such a service . Yesterday I walked along the street in St. Petersburg. There you can’t catch a taxi on Nevsky. I want to make a claim to you. I am very offended. What is all about? It used to be so simple, but now it’s impossible. I was late for the train. You go and want - wave your hands, you want - legs, that is, without such a service it is simply impossible, in principle, to do.

    I’m starting to think more deeply about this and I understand that probably in 5-7 years this way of catching a taxi will simply die out, that is, people will do 90% of their things from their smartphones. There are so many advantages, and they begin to outweigh in total - this is safer, and your situation is completely trackable, that is, you know who you called and so on, that is, everything becomes transparent there, and billing is transparent. You can simply withdraw money from a card, without money you can go. We have dining rooms around Yandex that feed on a badge. Do you know yes? The Yandex badge is a means of payment. We have about twenty restaurants around, and Yandex can have them. The situation when you don’t even have a dime in your pocket, nothing but a badge, and you can have lunch.

    The same story will be with Yandex.Taxi. You tied a card there. You don’t have a dime, nothing, you forgot your card, your wallet is everything, but you can go by taxi because you tied the card there six months ago. I think such things will make life so much more convenient, so much easier. It seems to me that we will all use such applications. It seems to come, and it will be so dominant. And how did we live without it before? How did we live without a cell before? How did we live without such a way to call a taxi?

    Returning, yet again about innovation. Our internal rival is always based on what we want, know how, love and do the most complex algorithmic mathematical problems best of all. When it came time to do a search for the entire Internet, we did it. When it came time to do ranking, when it came time to do linguistics at a new level, all the tasks that we had to solve, we are not afraid of them, we have no problem in this place. There was a task to make machine translation. Even 8, 9, 10 years ago, there was not even an understanding of how to make it right, that is, an understanding that prevailed then, it led to a dead end.

    There was a prevailing understanding that you can find very smart people called linguists and ask them to describe the language, that is, ask them to describe all the languages ​​of the world and ask them to make these languages ​​translate into each other according to the rules. This path leads nowhere. We already understood this when we started our project five years ago, but we had absolute confidence that we could do it, and literally in a year and a half we made this service and made it very good. We are comparing ourselves now with the best systems of Google or Microsoft, and we see that we are by the key metrics or better, or the same.

    Another example is speech recognition. This is a very recent story. Two years ago, we had nothing, not a single person, except for the partner company with which we worked. We just took someone else's speech recognition. A very difficult task, a huge subject area. Decades, hundreds of man-years there have been driven into various, tens, hundreds, thousands of articles, and also the feeling that everything can be done. The school of data analysis is an algorithmic school, the mathematical school that we have allows us to be absolutely not afraid of anything. There is not a single task of artificial intelligence in it that we would be afraid of, which we could not do. This is if we talk about the inner sense of self and a sense of what is coming out of our pen right now.

    Now about Google Glass. Google Glass is a very cool thing. I’m only very afraid that it will not take off - in the sense that at least it’s impossible to use it yet, but it’s great when a company with 70,000 people has the resources to do such side projects, very cool and very cute and inspirational, and people begin to think very strongly about this company. I do not want to say that this is continuous PR. Of course not. People who do this are obligated to believe that it will certainly take off, but you must understand that this is a good product in the sense that it is a combination of well-known products.

    This is a combination of well-known batteries with the famous Android, with the well-known fairly simple operating system, which Google bought four or five years ago and is now opening the open source. In general, I'm not sure that as a product for a person it will be needed. From what I’m reading about this product, from what I’ve tried, I touched it, while it’s impossible to use it. I have a feeling, maybe I'm wrong, but the inspirational idea, of course, and I am very glad that good companies show us such examples, but we need to move our own way.

    I think we will have gadgets too. At least we are not working on them right now. That is, gadgets, such glands that you can take in your hand: Yandex some kind of magic such, glasses, belt, ring. There everything is yours. There your key is private, the headphone immediately with a search.

    In general, there are many different ideas. Now bracelets and watches are very fashionable, because they can do a lot at the same time. They can measure your heart rate. They can keep track of how much you walk and how much you run. They can do something else useful. In fact, the bracelet may still have your token, your authorization device. In general, also from understandable, fairly simple components. I do not know what of this will become a vital necessity.

    Viewer:
    - Good evening! My name is Dmitry, the city of Perm. You said that at first you were engaged in programming, and then you went on to the manual. You did not say how this transition happened. Generally, why did it happen, and don't you miss the code?

    Ilya:
    - He switched rather painfully. I tried to come back, dived. The last time, in my opinion, in 2008 or in 2009, he wrote something like that, accelerated Yandex by seven percent, was very proud. After that, a year later, he helped one guy to make a rather complicated algorithm, he was also very proud. With its help, the number of duplicates of issuance decreased markedly. It was called RD-5. Unfortunately, I hardly write anything like this. The transition was painful. I was a playing coach all the time.

    When even Yandex already received investments, incorporated, became a company, probably for seven or eight years I continued to fade out as a manager and at the same time write, that is, be a playing coach, but for the last four or five years I haven’t written anything, but I talk a lot and understand about how much it costs to write. Therefore, you won’t be fooled, that is, in this sense, experience is a useful thing, but I follow the news, read Habré and carefully monitor the changes in the language. Under the threat of execution, if I get kicked out of Yandex, I have two scenarios.

    The first scenario is to become a truck driver. Anya talked about Mary’s Children. We also had a moment ten years ago when a bus was really needed in the studio, and a Toyota representative gave us an old Toyota. Well, how did you give it? Sold, but cheap. The trick was that there were fourteen places. Fourteen seats are already a category D driver’s license. So, you had to get them somehow, but there was nobody. So I went, honestly, I studied for two months on some terrible LAZ. Very interesting.

    Nobody drove a bus, LAZ? Very cool. These guys are all hard workers, and by the way, I was a more or less good driver, because I had many years of experience driving a minibus. We had an eight-seater minibus, transit, old, then there was a new one. I had seven years of experience, and I understood how the dimensions are arranged, how to taxi. I remember that I pass, I don’t even pass the exam yet, but studied. And I sit down, put on the transfer, and it’s necessary to get under way there.

    I say: "What is this?" There is such a move. I say: “Is this the second, fourth or back?” He says: “Until you start, you don’t understand. If you start, you will understand. What are you asking me? ” So the truck driver is the first.

    The second is by the programmer. A programmer under execution, under the threat of famine of the family, I can quite, I think, on something so simple, on Python to sculpt something, some sites - with pleasure. I will not be disgraced.

    Spectator:
    - Denis, Perm. I would like to ask such a question. In order to find out the weather, I go to Yandex.Weather, but forecasts often do not coincide with reality. Why it happens?

    Ilya:
    - This is a very good and deep question, it is philosophical. Our entire School of Data Analysis, our 140 graduates who work, they are mainly engaged in artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence models human behavior. That is, everything that is taught in our school — we learn how to predict a person: what he loves, what he does not love, what he thinks is useful, what seems to him useless, what kind of translation he likes, what he just said, and the machine must understand what he said. We read a person all the time, we always predict a person, and with the weather - it's such a thing.

    This, they say, is not a man, but God draws the weather, and therefore it is necessary to predict and guess a completely different creature, and we have no algorithms about this creature in the School of Data Analysis. I’m joking, but actually it’s just really not our area, and we just take other people's data in this place. We do not have sensors on the side, and we have not yet been engaged in prediction, but in general a good question is whether you can actually do it. I just don’t know if there is a business there, but the topic is very interesting.

    In at least one area, we have already begun to predict, to understand what nature has left for us. In the fields we have such a project, Yandex.Terra. Two or three dozen people from the company adjacent to us work there, who are engaged in predicting where there is a field and where there is no field. They use our algorithmic basis, our computing platform, so we are moving a little in this direction, but the weather has not reached it yet.

    Viewer:
    - I have a question about mistakes. Were they at all? Did they shoot down or direct, inspire? How? Here are the errors in the computer.

    Ilya:
    “You took me by surprise.” In my opinion, I have not answered this question yet, or maybe I answered and forgot, so now it’s a little difficult for me. Surely and certainly there were a lot of mistakes. Please, a recent example. We tried to do three years ago before the IPO - and even tried to make this story big - to launch such a new business model around local businesses. We spent quite a lot of effort and made a product called Yandex.Directory. And they figured out how to sell advertising there, but he did not fly. So, we have to redo everything. So we did everything wrong. This is an example of such an error.

    In fact, there are quite a few such services that did not fly. We have a cemetery of dead projects, of course. Somewhere in Yandex such a page. You can dial, see. The dead are taken there, the monuments stand to them, that is, everything is as it should be. What can you do? Indeed, it didn’t work, people didn’t like it, or somehow it burned out by itself, that is, this topic ended. Nothing. This should be taken philosophically, if we talk about some kind of dead projects, but about some serious mistakes that somehow dramatically influenced the fate of the company - I can’t say that there were some destructive mistakes due to which the half-team gone.

    Fortunately, we didn’t have such a thing. No, there were mistakes when, for example, I remember, we bought a company. I don’t want to go into details now, specifically which ones, but there were cases when, for example, we bought one company, and it turned out later that the sellers of this company managed to quarrel and disperse half the team immediately before selling to us, and we bought it is not clear what, but it turned out later. It was a mistake, a tragic mistake for the guys who were there inside this small company that poured into ours. But for us, too, such an essential lesson.

    We must think carefully and see who works there, what kind of people they are, and so on. We have already made the following purchases more accurately, although all acquisitions of companies are not an easy story for us, that is, we cannot say that they are all successful. But this, by the way, is typical for most acquired companies around the world. As a rule, it is very rare that the founders of a company remain. That is, they will work for two or three years and then leave. I don’t know if this is a mistake or not, or it’s just a natural movement.

    Viewer:
    - My name is Roman. I am a representative of Tyumen State University. I have a question. How do you build your relations with public authorities? I remembered that there was such an information scandal with the dismissal of the head of Russian Railways. There was such a thing in the media space, and Yandex was involved there. Still, this is already a powerful information resource. How do you build your policy in this regard?

    Ilya:
    - In fact, for a very long time we really rejected the role of a powerful information resource and continue to consider ourselves internally such nerds, people who are only occupied with mathematics, who do not understand anything about politics, we are not interested in it. In many ways, it is - this is our internal policy of the company. She is public, she is declared. We really consider ourselves people as neutral as possible, regardless of religious, gender or other preferences, including sexual ones. In this sense, we have complete neutrality. At the same time, unfortunately, if you look at the current political situation in Russia, it is such that too much attention is paid to some not very significant things.

    A classic example of this stupid story about Yakunin. When news appears on the Internet, it often happens that the site itself, on which its own main thing happened, some kind of video clip or some freshly launched site of some government agencies or some fresh news in a foreign language - it so often turns out that on On this site no text is readable by users. Therefore, for many years we have been doing this trick: we take news messages and make a presentation out of them, such a snippet that describes the events, and put the link on the original site. It somehow happened that for two years since it was launched, we don’t write “Found by link” because it’s not exactly a link, it’s collected from news messages. It was not clear what to write.

    Nobody even knew that we were doing this, everyone used the service because: a) it finds, b) the address that is needed, c) the description is relevant. There were no problems for two years, until this stupid incident happened, namely, that all central mass media objectively wrote that “at three o’clock and fifteen minutes this-and-such will be written to this address”, and the whole the cluster - RIA Novosti, Kommersant, and someone else - they all wrote it. Therefore, Yandex.News completely automatically inserted this address, rewrote the words from "RIA Novosti" and showed it on its own issue.

    Now Yandex was to blame. Be careful. We will write that this is not the text of the site, but the text of the news and so on. It's okay, fixable, but there was just no politics in this. We did not have any debate or any problems, or any political talks on this subject. There were some other stories in the past when you had to talk somehow, but this particular episode is purely technical, absolutely does not carry any politics, it simply inflated the political history, and not even Yandex and the government, but the journalists.

    Spectator:
    - Hello, Ilya! My name is Sergey. I want to ask you two questions. The first concerns Yandex.Taxi. He now works only in Moscow and St. Petersburg. When are you planning to advance to the markets of other cities?

    Ilya:
    - Firstly, in my opinion, somewhere else. In my opinion, a few more cities.

    Spectator:
    - And when will Yekaterinburg be?

    Ilya:
    - I understood your question. I can even name the dates. I think that before the end of the year there will be a fairly significant expansion of cities.

    Spectator:
    - The second question. You are a programmer. The programmer needs to self-educate. Has it ever happened to you that you are looking for something on the Internet, in Yandex, and cannot find it?

    Ilya:
    - I was self-educated once upon a time in books, because of which I stood in lines in the early nineties. When I went online, I was self-educated on the Internet. Until about 2008, we did not have a global search at all. We had a rather thin layer of mostly the main pages of Western sites that we somehow dragged into Yandex, and this was enough for us to stream our audience, because, in my opinion, 90% of the audience did not need English. Since 2008, we had the first launch, in 2010 or in 2011 - the second. We now have a fairly large English base, and we worked very intensively especially in the past and the year before last on the quality of this search.

    Therefore, I myself personally find 80–90% of all Western technical literature and information now on yandex.ru or on yandex.com. This is a very important principle. It is a principle that eat your own dog food, that is, if you do not eat, no one can eat it. Therefore, I am looking in Yandex, but I do not have any religious problems with this. I am good with Google, and with Microsoft I am good. We don’t have any prohibitions on using Google at all in the company or anything else like this: “Leave Google, everyone in here.” There is nothing like that.

    Ilya:
    - Hello! I'm Ilya. I represent Moscow State Technical University. Bauman. You, as a large information company, not only provide information to your users, but also collect information about them. For example, such services as Yandex.Traffic, Yandex.Taxi, Yandex.Navigator. You get a lot of information about movements. Such a question: did the special services of the Russian Federation contact you, did they try to take this information from you?

    Ilya:
    - No, if short, but if long, then the story is approximately the following. Right now, most of our mobile apps are almost not user-centric. Taxis are tied in the sense that your phone is there, and Yandex.Maps, Yandex.Navigator and other products, trains, subways, they are not tied to the user. This, on the one hand, is good, and on the other hand, it is not very good, because we look at what our competitors are doing, our favorite competitor Google and other less beloved competitors.

    We see that they are trying this information, naturally, with the permission of the user to receive and improve the life of the user. They have such a Google Now product, now it is simply called Google Services, if I'm not mistaken. I can’t say that I am completely delighted with him, just as I don’t share the enthusiasm for Google Glass. I really appreciate the PR campaign, I really appreciate the Google PR team, but, so to speak, my heart does not beat faster from this product. I use it, but it does not beat, but there the idea is about the same as you say.

    All your trips, all your routes are taken, regardless of which device you built them on, on which device you went somewhere, and your story constantly arrives on your phone, on your Android, it is always on the screen. You open Android, and here is the last route that you laid out on the desktop. This is due to the fact that you are everywhere logged in, and you are logged in, because Android by itself requires a login, that is, when you launch Android, you quietly turn on the tracking function immediately, just turning on Android without doing anything else. Yandex has no such powerful features yet, we do not have Android, but we understand why this is necessary.

    If we set aside conspiracy theories and set aside espionage stories, and set aside the story about the authorities and so on, which will come and be sure to ask, but even if we discard this story, it’s still clear why the user needs it - because this information, and it helps you look for queries. You pull out your phone in the evening at a cafe near Google’s cafe and it’s written there, since 120 people at that time traditionally on Fridays, being in this cafe, asked for a taxi at six in the evening, then please click on the button, call a taxi, or did such and such searches, drove somewhere.

    Viewer:
    - Good afternoon! My name is Arthur. I represent the Far Eastern Federal University. We have an incubator called Terra Creative. There are many young people who have ideas about the Internet, about some sites, projects. How is it possible without experience, without experience, to somehow test them, to understand, is it worth working on them further? I think that many who are here also have some ideas, thoughts. Perhaps some advice? The second question is the issue of financing. If a large company has some interesting project, is there a possibility of direct financing?

    Ilya:
    - Regarding testing - I do not know. In fact, the best way to test is to find analogues and understand whether they fly or don’t fly, didn’t they succeed in doing the same or is this an absolutely original idea and no one has anything like it, or is it original in some subject area , or it is original in some area, in some country. A person should not be necessarily experienced, but he should not be afraid to look for something similar, not be afraid to watch and use something similar, install this application for himself, connect, register on this site to understand what it is. Such an experience is invaluable, and it is more important than many years of experience on the Internet.

    The second is financing. Firstly, we tried many times to launch a program called Yandex.Start. She was called that. I can’t say that it was a great success. We have twice, in my opinion, financed several projects, or even three times, but somehow we did not manage to achieve this stability. Our last experience with financing is just the Tolstoy Summer Camp. We launched Tolstoy Summer Camp yesterday. This is an incubator inside Yandex. We found that we have an entire floor empty. In fact, this is not so, but, in general, they pretended that we had an entire floor empty, released him and invited a lot of teams.

    In general, there was a big competition, in my opinion, there were several hundred applications. Several dozens of teams were selected, and now they are all sitting and working. Today I just saw them, was on this floor. Yandex financing. Ideas remain in the hands of the guys, that is, we do not buy anything, we do not require anything for it - it's just such a nice two-month factory. We have some kind of symbolic rights. If we like the project, we can continue to finance it and get a share for it, but for now this is a clean pioneer camp, free of charge, with a very good atmosphere. Very talented guys, just everyone is thrilled.

    Will the profession of psychologist disappear due to the appearance of personal assistants in the smartphone? It seems to me that everything related to the amount of knowledge, it really somehow creeps into the application, on the Internet, but everything related to motivation, everything related to guidance, everything related to the direction of a person, it will all remain human. This is a story about education. I heard a lot, read and seen enough, and myself somehow became involved recently in various educational initiatives, modern online initiatives, and I clearly understand now that the traditional profession of a teacher as a person who brings the amount of knowledge to the class and retells this amount to students , this profession is dying out.

    There remains another profession - the profession of a teacher as a motivator, as a person who inspires, encourages, but the amount of knowledge is already so physically, without splashing, it is not necessary to carry it from head to head, everything has changed. In this sense, I think the same with a psychologist.

    Spectator:
    - Hello! My name is Olga. Higher School of Economics, Moscow. By my occupation, I know that such platforms as, for example, Mail.Ru, the news agency RIA Novosti actively cooperate with bloggers. I’m very interested in the attitude of Yandex with bloggers. Are there any joint projects or are they planned?

    Ilya:
    - To be honest, I don’t know anything about the relationship of RIA Novosti and Mail.Ru with bloggers. And what exactly? What service?

    Spectator:
    - Forum of bloggers, events.

    Ilya:
    - We also had such events. When we were engaged in such educational activities, telling how blog search works, how Yandex.News works, we gathered bloggers quite often and talked to them. It was an attempt to make contact, explain, tell, open up.

    Spectator:
    - Why was this only an attempt? Why is this not being done now?

    Ilya:
    - It’s being produced, but I don’t know when the last time was, I don’t remember, to be honest, but I think that in many respects the situation is changing, because social activity has changed. What bloggers are now becoming users of social networks, and this often naturally moves to the social networking site. Facebook carries out such things, VKontakte carries out such things. VKontakte, in my opinion, doesn’t, but Facebook definitely does for its active users.

    Spectator:
    - In general, it would be great if work was done with bloggers.

    Ilya:
    - We do not have a service that would be about social media. We have technical aggregation like TOP search on blogs or TOP news. This is technological aggregation. We tell in detail how it is arranged, what is inside, why so now, why not how it should be, why we believe that it is necessary, and not so. In this sense, we try to be as open as possible, but we do not have a monetization service for bloggers, that is, we do not directly monetize content bloggers. We do not have a large blogging site, first of all.

    Viewer:
    - Good evening! My name is Olga, Belgorod State University. Now there has been a tightening of the law on copyright protection, and many companies have already begun to use it. For example, MTS ads appeared on the websites of closed electronic libraries. Does Yandex have any plans for this? Maybe there are some projects to create an official Yandex.Library?

    Ilya:
    - About Yandex. Library, rather, no than yes, although we are working on the Yandex.Book service, which will allow people to read them legally and, perhaps, to search illegally, if we decide to take this step, then most likely We will develop this application.

    As for, relatively speaking, that we take advantage of the situation and somehow win back this unfortunate law, the law, in our opinion, is not very well written, we actively criticized it, and, unfortunately, we did not listen, the point of view was not the Internet - communities and not Internet businesses, but the prevailing point of view of traditional media businesses, which not only sold their position - this is not so bad. The problem is that they sold it legally illiterate, that is, the dialogue did not work there.

    There are so many mistakes that you cannot directly apply it, but I hope that they will not be used directly, but some kind of law enforcement practice will be developed that will be more or less reasonable, but what is written there is not very competent, roughly speaking . Are we going to somehow capitalize this law? No, we are not going to. We are going to somehow fix it, if we succeed.

    Let's formulate some obvious things that are already clear. First of all, there is a growing generation of people who do not know what a traditional computer is. There is a growing generation of people who can do everything on the Internet without a computer. They will do this with a smartphone, or at best with a tablet. This device, with which everything will be done, has several very fundamental things. Firstly, the other, more understandable, more primitive, on the one hand, and on the other hand, helping to do things faster interface.

    Many more sensors that understand where you are, whether you are moving now or not, the gyroscope is built in there, that is, he understands how it is, the compass, speech is recognized, the camera is not one, but two. The camera can intelligently understand something that is now in the lens. In this direction, development will take place in an absolutely obvious way, that is, more and more products will appear that change your life and are strongly associated with your device, which you carry in your pocket. This is somehow more or less obvious, but even without it there are many things that are changing even on the traditional Internet.

    It seems to me that the mobile Internet has set the vector for the entire Internet, that is, what you can do on the mobile Internet, you can make an application on your device. You put the application and buy a ticket. Very comfortably. Put the application and go to the movies or order a taxi. All these actions, which are now conveniently and simply done from the corresponding application, they will become even more convenient, even easier, maybe more integrated.

    What have we done recently? We launched what is called Yandex.Ostrov. This is an attempt, in fact, to saturate a regular search with such applications, so that the search, especially on a mobile device, installs such applications so that it has interaction, so that you can pick up and order a taxi directly from the search, take it and go to the movies . Such things will reach you more conveniently and simply, the search will happen faster. This is speaking about my specialty, and speaking generally about where the Internet business will go - I do not know, the platforms will change.

    I do not know what will happen to Windows. I’m not sure that she will live another ten years. It should change a lot, I think. I don’t know, it’s hard to say so right away. A lot will be connected with the fact that the device will predict what will happen next. I think that a lot will be connected with this. It will tell you something to shout, make noise, simulate, blink, hint. You will look at the screen, and he will immediately have something like that. Perhaps there will be identification, that is, there will be things that will be recognized by your voice, they will be recognized by your face. It is not very difficult. It is already working. Passwords will be canceled. I hate passwords. Passwords will disappear, I hope, in ten years. This will be the biggest change in human life - the disappearance of passwords.

    Viewer:
    - Hello! Alexander, Yekaterinburg. You know, I even changed my mind to ask a question. I really want to express my deep gratitude to you for your services. Also, if I may, can I tell you a short story about how cool your company is? The teacher came to us last semester, and he is a Yandex employee.

    After he read the discipline to us for the semester, I had such a wow effect, I learned so much, and after a short conversation with him he told me that he leads couples in the ShAD, I realized that you need to get there, in general, then, I applied some efforts to this and literally the day before yesterday I received a letter saying that come. I am very happy.

    Ilya:
    - Congratulations! Hurrah!

    Viewer:
    - Good evening! My name is Hovhannes. I wonder how well they know you on Google, and maybe they are afraid or respected?

    Ilya:
    - I think that we are known by specialists and company management, engineers, people in search of us know us well, because we are quite a respectable company, but this is not a story about what they know or do not know. I talked about this with someone yesterday, the topic was very similar. Self-esteem does not arise because foreigners praised you, because it’s good that they know about you, it’s good that they praised you. This means nothing.

    Spectator:
    - But do they consider you competitors? Are you afraid?

    Ilya:
    - Not that word. Quite tough measures are being taken both in our markets and in the markets we are trying to enter, and in Turkey, and so on. Everything is in order there - normal fair competition in full.

    Spectator:
    - And you did not cooperate with them? Did not think about it?

    Ilya:
    - In some areas, they collaborated. In terms of whether we wanted to sell them, for example?

    Spectator:
    - No, just join forces.

    Ilya:
    - It was ten years ago. We negotiated a sale, but decided not.

    Viewer:
    - I'm just wondering: which site is your homepage?

    Ilya:
    - I do not have a start site in the browser.

    Viewer:
    - And the browser?

    Ilya:
    - I have all the browsers. I’m not a typical creature at all. I have two more phones there and another fourth, everyone has different systems.

    Spectator:
    - What?

    Ilya:
    - Windows, Android and iPhone.

    Spectator:
    - And the fourth?

    Ilya:
    - The fourth was Siemens, now it is not there, but there was a second Android. Actually three phones, I lied a little. Same thing with the start page and the search engine. I use all. I have browsers of all systems that can only be. I try to use them honestly, update, check, otherwise you won’t understand what is happening, otherwise it’s impossible, you will lag behind.

    Viewer:
    - Hello! I am Ksenia, Tomsk Polytechnic. I would like to know more about the Yandex.Terra project from you. I learned about its existence from my supervisor. In general, it’s just interesting what motivation you had to create it, because, say, Yandex.Market and so on, they are for a wider user. And where did such a project come from?

    Ilya:
    “Here we have to tell you something.” Unfortunately, this is not my speech, this is Arkashin, but he is moving us very much in this direction, so I will try to portray him now. Arkady Volozh is my classmate, and at the same time the director of Yandex. We really really learned how to process large amounts of data and understand nature well, that is, we learned how to analyze them and apply the most accurate and correct artificial intelligence algorithms to this data. And then what? We know this market, we earn a billion dollars. We even roughly understand how to earn a second. There will be Turkey, there will be some other European country, there will be growth in Russia, of course.

    We see this horizon. We understand when we will have a second million. What to do next? The company needs it to grow. For the past six months, we have been actively promoting the idea in the company that arose two years ago, including with Yandex.Terra: let us use our skills to work with huge volumes of data, with different complex mathematical problems, not only in search, but also in more a wide range of human problems. The first sign was Yandex.Terra. Why did we have it? Because I and Arkasha, we are both geologists, or rather, geophysicists, and it so happened that we both gave up our specialty, took up pure computer science and artificial intelligence, but, nevertheless, this relationship remained.

    In particular, old acquaintances came, and we suggested ourselves: "Let's try to apply our platform for computing to geological problems." It was interesting to us. Then, three years ago, no one did it. We specifically conducted an analysis. MapReduce technology, our technology that we are currently using, is called (inaudible - approx. Ed.), It has not been used anywhere except in search, and technologically it was applicable in a much more universal sense.

    We started at first for free, in fact, we simply worked and studied on a contractual basis, and when we learned, when we brought the first pack of algorithms, we realized that it was cheap, efficient, no supercomputer needed, no super complex systems, but a big layer of geological tasks to decide on such serial equipment, on a single cluster of 20,000 computers that we have installed.

    When we learned to do this, then, about a year ago, we created the Yandex.Terra company. The idea is that come to us all the companies that need problems, we can calculate you, we can solve this problem for you. We hope that with the treatment of these elephants we will be able to earn a lot of money, because we are doing well.

    Viewer:
    - Hello! My name is Anton, MSTU. Bauman. You have a mountain of applications, and most importantly, Yandex.Money, since having a search engine, if a user sees an error, he simply will not use this service, but you will not lose anything from this except the user himself, and by entering a service like Yandex .Money, you are responsible for their personal financial resources, operations with them and so on. Did you take such a risk just to attract new users? I do not see commercial benefits.

    Ilya:
    - No no no. It was an absolute necessity at the beginning of the 2000s. The fact is that on the Internet there were completely no means of payment online. There were no credit cards in the country ten years ago, dear comrades, and those who had them did not use them on the Internet at all. They put them in an ATM, took out their entire salary right away, all one hundred percent, and everyone left with that salary.

    Spectator:
    - But you do not get any percentage from this service.

    Ilya:
    - We really have a small percentage, indeed this is not our main project, especially since we have now sold a substantial part of this project to Sberbank. We own only 25%, however, with the right to manage, but it is important that we understood that without this there would be no online payments, without this there would be no payment for our advertising. We could not collect money for advertising at all. We could not sell ads online. Going to Sberbank and filling out paperwork is a nightmare, people have suffered.

    Therefore, we struggled with this problem and somehow defeated it. For a long time it was a very significant channel of payments, but, among other things, it is peer-to-peer payments, these are ways of very different uses, this is payment for the purchase of toys, codes, you can pay at the store, you can buy tickets. It so happened that, due to our sequence, we have covered a fairly large number of users with this service, and as far as security is concerned, we have an algorithm that is just decent encryption and an understanding of how to do this safely.

    Viewer:
    - When you introduced the service, were you completely sure of its stability?

    Ilya:
    - If we were not sure, we would not introduce. We were absolutely sure. There is such a myth that the Internet is such an unsafe environment. It is quite actively cultivated, and this can only be fought by promoting the opposite and explaining how safe life on the Internet is, observing certain hygiene standards. If you eat tomatoes every day with dirty hands and the ground, as a result you will have some kind of stomach infection sooner or later. So on the Internet, but there is some hygiene. Do not run unfamiliar applications. Why are you doing it? Why did you run the executable from some left site? Why did you do this? You got infected, it turns out? Amazing

    This business is quite simple, in my opinion, with security on the Internet. There is math. There are no refuted theorems of algorithmic complexity. It is very difficult to decompose purely into simple factors. It really is, really very difficult, nothing can be done. Indeed, no computer power is enough to do this. There is a whole cryptocurrency now. I don’t know if you know or don’t know about bitcoin. Here you are, absolutely safe, in the mathematical sense, safe thing, at least as of mathematics for 2013, so there’s nothing wrong with being careful.

    Viewer:
    - Just a mistake in a normal search could lead to such significant consequences.

    Ilya:
    “I heard you.” No, the risks were calculated, they were small, no problems.

    Spectator:
    - Hello! My name is Nikita, Novosibirsk State Technical University. I have a few questions for you. Judging by the attacks on the Internet that are now taking place around the world and especially in Russia, how do you see the future of the network itself?

    Ilya:
    - We won’t go anywhere without the Internet.

    Viewer:
    - You do not think that people simply will not use it, because there will be nothing to do on the Internet?

    Ilya:
    - I do not really understand what there is nothing to do when all the basic infrastructure services, including state ones, are already on the Internet. Without the Internet, now the mine can’t get anything. Without the Internet, production does not work now. Someone thinks that the Internet is such a thing that is not really needed. Dear friends, you are mistaken. Now a cow cannot be milked without the Internet; a cow is milked by the Internet. Now everything is riddled with fiber, everything is riddled with wires. All the business processes of all the major agricultural industries, transport - all this is the Internet, there is nothing else. Therefore, it is not a question of the existence of the Internet. I wanted to say that I heard you and am trying to answer your concerns, as I understand you.

    The story that there is such a way lately to make a bugbear from the Internet. Let us pump up. Let's talk about how scary it is, and this is absolutely pointless enough, because there is nothing behind the words. People who say this, they either say some kind of technological nonsense, or they knowingly lie. You just have to try to separate. At the same time, I must understand the reasons for the concern that people have in their heads, and for some reason they project this necessarily on the Internet. And they don’t want to project these fears on their neighbors? Neighbors are very scary. Through the Internet, at least no one will flood, and the neighbor can still fill.

    There is such a thing - a television, such a square box, and there is such a coaxial cable from the mid-eighties that goes away, before you are born, it is called a television antenna. It is necessary to split such postings. I have not had it for 14 years, but I know what people have. Try to watch less. They are still fighting for their media. Their task is for people to receive news, for example, not on the Internet, but on television. Therefore, they get paid for it, they need to advertise TV, and scold the Internet. They just got another wire. They have a one-way wire, and two-way on the Internet.

    Viewer:
    - Another technical issue. Currently, many software products are distributed and during installation they replace search, the home page.

    Ilya:
    - Do not install programs unknown to you and do not run, please.

    Spectator:
    - I understand you perfectly, but often there is a Yandex search.

    Ilya:
    - Yandex search, according to our rules, which we published at the beginning of 2007, never happens without explicit notification of users, explicit checkbox. If such cases arise, please write, call, shout. This is strictly prohibited by our rules. We never do that.

    Moderator:
    - Maybe you want to say something without question?

    Ilya:
    - I wanted to say that I was shocked by this audience, this lively interest and how people stood for two hours. In general, I never thought that I could stand two hours. Thank you very much.
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