I was surprised to see that the Ya part meant “Yet another”. I mean, I’ve seen it before in many acronyms. But it’s pretty tongue in cheek of them to do that here since one would expect it was just because it was made by Yandex.
I was expecting it to be a Russian acronym starting with the letter Я which is pronounced Ya. It acquired its backward R glyph when it was changed from an old Slavic letter I cannot draw.
What do you mean that you "cannot draw" them? This is a digital medium and both (well one, the other is half supported) variants are valid Unicode glyphs:
I could not reproduce it by hand without a reference nor do I have a keyboard installed which offers it as a symbol, nor was I going to look it up to add the spice to a shower thought tier HN comment.
I see you have provided it, making it more accessible for my future use, at least on the timeframe of this thread being in my recent HN activity.
There's a third explanation of "Яndex" being "языковой индекс" i.e. "language-aware index". Russian language have complicated morphology with three genders and six grammatical cases, somewhat similar to Latin. Searching by an exact word-match almost never gives good results, and neither Yahoo nor AltaVista could offer any better in 1997 -- hence Yandex was built.
