Sputnik (Rostelecom)

» see sputnik.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Russian search company that actually reached me was the other one. Yandex opened a Turkish site in 2011, put its maps into cars in Ankara, and spent years trying to take share off Google in a market where nobody had asked for a second option either. It failed at that too, but it failed while being used. Sputnik never got as far as being used.

Rostelecom, the state telecom operator, showed it on 22 May 2014 at the St Petersburg economic forum. The technology underneath had been built between 2006 and 2012 by a separate team and bought outright. The framing at launch was civic rather than commercial: a search engine that would put government services and local pharmacy hours in front of ordinary Russians without the noise of the open web. That framing is also the tell. Nobody builds a search engine to be helpful about pharmacy hours.

It opened well, in the way a state product opens well. Half a million people came the first day and two million within the week, because it was on every news broadcast in the country. Then the curve did what curves do when a product is dutiful rather than better. May 2014 counted 167,400 visitors. August counted 16,600.

The interesting thing is what happened to the money after that. Around twenty million dollars was committed in October 2013 before anything shipped, and by 2016 the total spend had passed two billion rubles. In 2017 the company stopped pretending it was in the consumer business and repositioned toward selling search and filtering software to government offices, which is where a project like this always ends up when the public will not come.

~ the case file ~

~ what the state was buying ~

Sputnik was never only a search box. It carried weather, television schedules, currency rates, and a maps layer stitched from OpenStreetMap and 2GIS data, plus a section for household matters and one for children. There was a personal account that connected to the state services portal. On 30 September 2015 it shipped a Chromium browser with an ad blocker and support for the Russian GOST encryption standard, which is the part that explains the whole project: a browser that can talk to government systems is a piece of infrastructure, and infrastructure gets budget.

That is the honest reading of what was being bought. Not a competitor to Yandex, which would have been absurd, but a search stack the state owned end to end, so that if the question of who indexes Russia ever became urgent, there would be an answer sitting on a shelf. The consumer product was the cover story for the shelf.

~ the numbers that got out ~

In July 2016 Sputnik was sending 4,100 searches a day. Yandex was sending 74.2 million. By 2017 LiveInternet put the state engine below one percent of the Russian market, and it sat around fifteenth in a country with three serious search products. The company lost more than fifty million rubles that year. In 2019 it booked 66.7 million rubles of revenue against a net loss of 183.2 million.

In August 2018 Rostelecom filed a bankruptcy petition against its own subsidiary over a debt of 10.6 million rubles, which is a strange document to read: the parent suing the child for the price of a small apartment, after spending two billion on it. The company was restructured as SputnikLab and the search team's work was folded into enterprise contracts.

~ what still answers on the domain ~

There was never a shutdown announcement. On 8 September 2020 the trade press noticed the search field was gone from sputnik.ru and only links to other Rostelecom products remained. Asked about it, the press service said the subsidiary continued to operate fully, which was true in the sense that a company existed and false in the sense that anyone reading the story cared about.

The browser lost support on 31 January 2022. SputnikLab was declared bankrupt in 2023. In 2024 the FSB warned people to stop using the browser after the domain behind its update service ended up with an American company, which is a fitting last chapter for a product built so that this class of problem would not exist. Today sputnik.ru still resolves. What it serves is a JavaScript shell that asks you to enable JavaScript and then shows you nothing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »