Yandex Q

» see yandex.ru/q as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Antonina Samsonova had been a journalist, which turns out to matter for what she built. TheQuestion launched on 15 March 2015 as a Russian answer to Quora, and the editorial method came straight out of a newsroom: rather than waiting for an expert to wander in, the staff went and asked specific people specific questions and published what came back. The answers had names and jobs attached to them.

It grew quickly. Roughly 200,000 unique users at the start became four million by 2017. By 2018 the monthly audience was above sixteen million, which is a real Russian-language property rather than a project, and in 2019 Yandex bought it.

Yandex already had its own version of the idea running under the name Знатоки, and in March 2019 the two were merged and renamed Яндекс Кью. The combined service reported a daily audience above three million in February 2020. Samsonova stayed on and ran it until the beginning of 2022, when Andrey Plakhov took over. She left Yandex entirely that March.

Yandex has had a Turkish search portal since 2011, so the brand has never been foreign here. Кью was not part of that. It was a Russian-language expert-answers product for a Russian-language readership, and the only way to read it from Ankara is the way you are reading about it now.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Russia already had a very large question-and-answer site in Ответы Mail.Ru, which had been running since 2006 and worked the way those sites usually work: anyone asks anything, anyone answers, the good replies and the nonsense arrive together. TheQuestion was built against that. Its whole pitch was that you would know who was talking and why they were qualified to.

Under Yandex it picked up the things a search company adds. Answers started surfacing directly in search results and communities got their own pages, and the expert model widened into something closer to a general platform. That widening is probably also what made it hard to explain what the thing was for.

~ the museum ~

On 29 May 2023 Yandex announced it was suspending development. On 28 June the ability to publish anything new disappeared and the service went read-only. The company was careful with the wording: we are not closing Кью, we are freezing it, to think over a possible development strategy. Everything users had written together would be kept. Yandex called the result a museum of content.

More than three years later the freezing has not thawed and there has been no strategy. What there is, is yandex.ru/q, which loads today, with every question and every answer where it was left on a Wednesday in June 2023. It is a rare shape for a dead product. Nothing was deleted and nothing can be added, and the whole thing sits there with the lights on.

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