Ilya Segalovich

Ilya Segalovich (1964–2013) was a Russian software engineer and co-founder of Yandex, serving as its chief technology officer and an executive director from 2000. Together with his childhood classmate Arkady Volozh Arkady VolozhArkady Volozh (born 1964) is a technology entrepreneur born in Soviet Kazakhstan and the principal founder of Yandex, which he led as CEO from 2000 to 2022, taking the Russian-language search company to a Nasdaq listing and building it into Russia’s largest internet company. In June 2022 he was sanctioned by the EU and stepped down from Yandex; in 2023 he publicly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in March 2024 the EU removed him from its sanctions list, and that year he became CEO of Nebius Group, formed from Yandex’s businesses outside Russia.Open the full entry he developed Russian-language full-text search technology and named the search engine Yandex YandexYandex (Яндекс) is a Russian-origin internet technology group that started as a Russian-language search engine, launched yandex.ru in 1997, and later expanded into advertising, maps, ride-hailing, food delivery, e-commerce, cloud computing and artificial intelligence; it is often called “Russia’s Google.” Its Dutch parent, Yandex N.V., was once listed on Nasdaq; after the 2022 Russia–Ukraine war the group came under sanctions and political pressure, and in 2024 the Dutch parent sold its Russian businesses to a Russian purchaser consortium, renamed the businesses kept outside Russia Nebius Group, and left the Yandex brand with the Russian businesses.Open the full entry; he led the company’s early search technology and was long involved in children’s charity work.

Contents11 sections

Key facts

September 13, 1964Birth

Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich was born on September 13, 1964, in Nizhny Novgorod.⁠[1][2]

1970s–1986Mathematics School and the Geological Exploration Institute

At a special school for students gifted in mathematics, Segalovich met Arkady Volozh and became his close friend; the two shared a desk for four years. In the 1980s he entered the S. Ordzhonikidze Moscow Geologic Exploration Institute (now the Russian State Geological Prospecting University) in Moscow, graduating in 1986 with a degree in geophysics.⁠[3][3][3][4][1]

1990Leading the Software Team at Arkadia

From 1990 Segalovich worked on information retrieval technology at Arkadia, the company founded by Volozh, where he headed the software team.⁠[4]

1993–2000Developing Russian-Language Search and Naming Yandex

From 1993 to 1996 Segalovich and his classmate Volozh developed a text indexing technology that could search the Bible and Russian classical literature while taking Russian morphology into account; it became the foundation of the search engine Yandex.ru, launched in 1997. From 1993 to 2000 he led the retrieval systems department at CompTek International.⁠[1][1][4]

Segalovich came up with the search engine’s name: he wrote down on paper the words that best described the program’s essence, he and Volozh kept returning to “search” and “index,” and they settled on Yandex, short for “yet another indexer.”⁠[5][5][6]

2000Becoming Chief Technology Officer of Yandex

In 2000 Segalovich left CompTek International to co-found the company Yandex, becoming chief technology officer and an executive director. He also helped create the National Corpus of the Russian Language (Ruscorpora) and ROMIP, the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar.⁠[4][1][7][4]

2003Arguing Against Selling to Google

When Google offered to buy Yandex in 2003, early investor Leonid Boguslavsky recalled, management considered the offer seriously, but Segalovich said, “Let’s fight,” and Yandex was not sold.⁠[8][8]

2011Joining Protests Against the Election Results

In 2011 Segalovich joined public protests against the results of the State Duma elections, along with some Yandex employees, while Volozh did not take part. Lev Gershenzon, a former head of Yandex News, saw Segalovich as “the heart” of the company who set the “moral standard” for Yandex; Alexey Sokirko, an engineer who attended rallies with him, said he “was not radical” but supported the opposition.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

July 27, 2013Death

On July 25, 2013, Yandex issued a press release announcing Segalovich’s death, but on an analysts’ call later that day it clarified that he remained on life support and in critical condition. On July 27 Segalovich died in a London hospital at the age of 48.⁠[9][9][9][6][6]

Volozh said Segalovich was a lifelong friend whose contributions to the founding and development of the company were invaluable, and that his encyclopedic knowledge of technology and highest ethical standards had always set the benchmark for everyone. Then-Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called Segalovich’s life a success story that can and must be taken as an example.⁠[7][7][1]

2019The Ilya Segalovich Award Is Established

In January 2019 Yandex established a scientific prize named after Segalovich to recognize young researchers and supervisors in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan working in fields such as machine learning, computer vision, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine translation and speech recognition. The first award ceremony was held in Moscow on April 10, 2019, with nine laureates chosen from 262 applications; at the third ceremony, each of the six winners received one million rubles.⁠[5][10][10][10][10][10][11]

Philanthropy

Segalovich co-founded and long supported Maria’s Children (“Дети Марии”), an art rehabilitation center for orphans and children with special needs run by his wife, Maria Yeliseyeva; he came up with the organization’s name together with the children. He contributed time and money to its work with Russian orphanages, helping children get an education and organizing foreign exchange programs, and often visited children’s hospitals with a troupe of clowns.⁠[4][1][2][1][1]