That's all well and good, but in Scrabble, GOOGLE only scores 8 whereas YANDEX scores 17.

Triple and quadruple nope.

It was believed (conspiracy or otherwise) for many years, that google had stolen ideas from yandex they were that much behind them with similar ideas.

HoG

• Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin[41][27][42] with additional contribution from Scott Hassan
• Google has its origins in BackRub, a research project started in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California.
• The two had first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to give a tour around the campus and nearby San Francisco.

HoY

• In 1990, Arkady Volozh contacted Ilya Segalovich (1964–2013), a friend of his from high school, to join his venture developing algorithms to search Russian texts.[9] They developed search software together under the company name Arcadia.
• In 1993, they invented the name "Yandex" as an easy way to remember "Yet Another iNDEXer".[11] This is also a bilingual pun on "index" since "Я" ("ya") means "I" in Russian.
• On 23 September 1997, the Yandex.ru search engine was launched and presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. (It expired 10 days ago on Sep 30, 2026)

You are comparing bananas and tomatoes. Yandex LLC was registered in 2000, however, Yandex existed long before Brin and Page had even met. In 1997 Brin and Page only registered the domain because they wanted to secure it, but they were not ready to launch until 1998. The lesser demanded .ru TLD didn't require such panic, nor was it likely that somebody would steal that domain as yandex was their made up word. (Brin and Page registered 'google' thinking that they were registering 'googol' an already existing word.)

Active functioning search engine website "OFFICIAL LAUNCHES" - Google: August 1998 Yandex: 23 September 1997

Edit: And to clarify, I think the sensible metric here, that works in Yandex’s Googles favour by bringing the two within eight days of each other instead of approximately two years, is to use the date their search engine websites launched and were functioning, not when they filed paperwork that said “We’re legally a company now 🥳”.

Yes. You said the last bit with the wrong name. Yandex was officially launched and functioning almost a year before google. Yandex the name had come into existence two years before Page and Brin had even met. Arcadia (Yandex precursor) was 5 years before Backrub (Google precursor).