Ilya Segalovich, co-founder and CTO of Yandex
Ilya Segalovich, the co-founder and CTO of Russian search engine Yandex, has died in London from cancer at the age of 48.
Segalovich co-founded Yandex in 1997 with Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky in Moscow and it grew to be ranked as the fourth largest search engine on the planet, according to ComScore, with a market valuation of US$10bn.
The search engine has 60pc market share in Russia. Segalovich and Volozh had been friends since their school days and they invented the word Yandex as short for “Yet another INDEXer”.
Segalovich died on Saturday in a London hospital. He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and had been responding well to treatment.
However, it was subsequently discovered he had developed cancer of the brain.
A tribute page on Yandex read: “Yandex founder and director of technology, author of the first version of the search engine and the words of Yandex, a scholar and a citizen with an active lifestyle, one of the creators of the art rehabilitation centre ‘Children of Mary’, the father of five children. Friend, colleague, teacher, and hilarious clown.”
Below is an interview Siliconrepublic.com filmed with Segalovich at the Dublin Web Summit last October.
