What's wrong with Yandex? Is it quality of service being too low? Does the company have tracking records of shady practices, worst than what GAFAM are doing that make customer flee away?
What's wrong with Yandex? Is it quality of service being too low? Does the company have tracking records of shady practices, worst than what GAFAM are doing that make customer flee away?
In my experience, Yandex was feeding in a lot of low quality results into Kagi - lots of pirated software, shady websites, proxy duplicate copycat sites, content that I'll euphemistically call "free speech". Kagi has a domain blacklist feature, but I was starting to fill up my blocklist - I think it's capped at 1000 domains, and many of these sites spin up new domains specifically to get around blocklists.
There's also the geopolitical issues, which I'll skip over because similar concerns can be leveled at other indexes too. I posted about that on the Kagi feedback forums back in 2024:
https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...
I since built my own metasearch engine for my own use, where I choose the external indexes used, and I'm much happier. I started building a personal index of the web as well. I haven't used Kagi or Google for over a year now.
I hope I'm not distracting from Bruno's Uruky project here. Not everyone is technical enough to spin up some PHP code and make their own metasearch, or spin up a VPS and install a SearxNG instance. There's value in providing a good user experience for less technical users, in building resilience by using multiple indexes & building your own, and reducing dependencies on external index APIs that may cut off your access (coffgooglebingcoff). I'm glad services like Uruky exist.
Main feature of urky seems to really be privacy. on my own searxNG i would be all the traffic. If I ho through urky hopefully I can hide with traffic from other users.
It's Russian. Indirectly you are supporting Putin when you use it. Those sanctions aren't for no reason.
Kagi pays Yandex. So you are supporting directly
Kagi -> Yandex -> Putin (through taxes), it's not really direct IMO
Yandex these days is pretty much directly Kremlin, so it's not "through taxes".
That being said Kagi -> Yandex hop does indeed make it indirect.
(I too have stopped using Kagi after I found out that they pay Yandex and employ people who support Russian war).
Am I indirectly supporting Trump when I use DuckDuckGo?
Yes, and a lot of EU citizens/companies are actively in the process of migrating away from US based software/products to EU alternatives for, among others, this exact reason.
Yes. You're also supporting Bing ads. With a thin veneer of privacy washing goodness, of course.
I'll give you an introduction to Modern European Ethics™:
If you do something in this world and this life - remember you normally have about 70 years - there is always some detail of what you're doing that is worthy of criticism, shunning, and shaming. Since everything in the world is connected, you can't avoid it.
If however you do nothing in your life or with your life, then there is also nothing which you can be criticized for doing. And you can never be criticized for not doing something. When you die after a life toting the line and having the allowed opinion on every subject and shunning people who do things; then you go to European heaven - which is an eternity of committee meetings in Brüssels.
It's not really a thing. We all know flying is a really bad thing and still the skies are full of planes also in Europe. It's just an extra factor to take into account. Like, when you can choose another solution that does not have this factor.
It's not about moral superiority, just about awareness of the choices we make. I have several friends that don't do the "Bali" summer holiday thing anymore even though they would like to and can afford it. Because Greece is also fun and wastes a lot of less fuel.
I like this better than the current American approach of: "We know it's bad for the environment so we will do it as much as possible to extract more profit than others before the world becomes uninhabitable. Then we will have WON!"
^ Correct!