Officially, the first steps of the search engine was announced Yandex.Ru 23 September 1997 at the exhibition Softool. The key distinguishing features Yandex.Ru at that time were: * Check the uniqueness of the documents (excluding copies in different encodings). * Consideration of the morphology of Russian language (including the search for an exact word-form). * Searching for the light range (including within a paragraph, exact phrase). * Carefully assess the relevance of the developed algorithm takes into account not only the number of query words found in the text, but "Contrast" of the word (the relative frequency for a given document), the distance between the words and the position of words in the document.

Two months later, in November 1997, Yandex has answered the first search query. 1998 During the year, "volume" Russian Internet has doubled, resulting in the need to optimize the search engines. There were features: "Find a similar document." * The list of found servers. * Search the specified range of dates. * Sort the results of Search by time last modified. 1999 In 1999 Runet rose order, as in the volumes of texts, and in the number of users.

Yandex has created a new search robot, which will optimize and speed up the bypass sites LESBIAN. The users have new features: * Search in various areas of the text (headings, links, abstracts, addresses, signatures for pictures). * Limiting the search to a group of sites, search for links and images. * Select documents in Russian. Search appeared in the categories of the directory and for the first time in RuNet introduced the concept of "citation index" – the amount of resources that link to this. Founded in 2000 the company "Yandex". It was established shareholders CompTek – the company that created and for a long time to develop the project Yandex. The company ru-Net Holdings has invested 5.28 million dollars and received a share of the new company to 35.72%. The number of shareholders also includes managers and senior search engine developers. Director-General was appointed Arkady Volozh. Were opened Yandex.Mail, Yandex.News, Yandeks.Guru, Yandeks.Tovary, Yandeks.Otkrytki and Yandeks.Zakladki, as well as – "the ascetic Yandex"