I turn it down straight away for being Russian and I'm suspicious of anyone that mentions it positively.
Russia is in a cold war with democracies in general and a hot war with Ukraine. It has an autocratic dictator as leader and state control of media.
It has a well documented propaganda campaign with the goal of destabilising other countries through agitation. We even know the address of the building in Saint Petersburg it's run from.
Why would anyone try to assess Yandex's results? They could be like a slot machine serving good results 78% of the time and slipping propaganda in when least expected.
Why bother with that when there are good, free alternatives?
Couldn't we say the exact same thing about any US service in this day and age?
Trade war with half the planet, hot war with Iran. Autocratic dictator as leader and complicit media. Well documented propaganda campaign and history of destabilising countries around the world. Known to compel tech companies to spy on foreign citizens...
I have, and it has never been good for my purposes. In English, I just can't find things I need, in Russian, I find things I wish to never see again, tbh.
What is your experience with it?
Edit: The best search for my purposes historically has been on Pinterest. Unfortunately, not anymore. I normally search for visual artifacts (photos, art, schematics, etc), out of all search engines Google is still the only one that is somewhat functional for me in this regard.
I tried DDG, Kagi, Yandex. None of them worked for me.
The quintessential HN comment questioning the obvious.
Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't.
Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away.
> Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't
Does media manipulation score higher/lower on your moral index than the widespread domestic spying the US has forced tech companies to be complicit in?
Not that media manipulation by the US government is exactly an unheard of event (at least as far back as the whole WMDs in Iraq scandal).
> Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away
Look, I'm American myself, and have as keen a dislike of Russia's foreign and domestic policies as the next guy. But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference, in a manner that may be detrimental to their customers.
> But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference
It is very different degree of subjection where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff, and country, where if you dare even to complain about some wild highly illegal stuff that the kgb demands corporation that you working for to do, you end up getting 30 years in prison for treason, falling out of the window, getting poisoned by some chemical weapon, and even then you will be considering yourself a lucky man because nothing very, very bad had happened to your family.
> where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff
Post patriot act, we have none of those things in instances where the government invokes national security (for example, a national security letter can compel release of data without a court order, and comes with a pretty serious gag order)
I'm not American. You can say that Murica is up to no good, but RuZZia is definitely up to much much worse. It's way more oppressive and repressive by an order of magnitude. Employees at Yandex have to censor stuff about Putin and the war (see egorfine's screenshot) or they risk getting defenestrated, death by polonium, or death by torture. There is no "First Amendment". Putin's wishes are the law. He is trying very hard to destroy liberal democracies in Europe and around the world.
Of course Google is morally much better than Yandex. What sane mind would even question this? The fact that I'm getting downvoted just shows how out of touch this bubble is with real life.
Have you tried Yandex and evaluated the quality of its results, or do you just feel obligated to continuously put it down because it's russian?
I turn it down straight away for being Russian and I'm suspicious of anyone that mentions it positively.
Russia is in a cold war with democracies in general and a hot war with Ukraine. It has an autocratic dictator as leader and state control of media.
It has a well documented propaganda campaign with the goal of destabilising other countries through agitation. We even know the address of the building in Saint Petersburg it's run from.
Why would anyone try to assess Yandex's results? They could be like a slot machine serving good results 78% of the time and slipping propaganda in when least expected.
Why bother with that when there are good, free alternatives?
Couldn't we say the exact same thing about any US service in this day and age?
Trade war with half the planet, hot war with Iran. Autocratic dictator as leader and complicit media. Well documented propaganda campaign and history of destabilising countries around the world. Known to compel tech companies to spy on foreign citizens...
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It's not whataboutism, it's calling out a "proving too much" fallacy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-to...
Maybe so they can bring actual data to the discussion instead of bias.
I have, and it has never been good for my purposes. In English, I just can't find things I need, in Russian, I find things I wish to never see again, tbh.
What is your experience with it?
Edit: The best search for my purposes historically has been on Pinterest. Unfortunately, not anymore. I normally search for visual artifacts (photos, art, schematics, etc), out of all search engines Google is still the only one that is somewhat functional for me in this regard.
I tried DDG, Kagi, Yandex. None of them worked for me.
Have you tried its image search? It's pretty good compared to its competitors. Google's image search fell off as they severely nerfed it.
Google is terrible these days, I agree.
I did.
https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large...
How about topics the Russian government doesn't care about?
How about topics that USA censors?
Of course you should not search Ukraine info on yandex. But you are only showing the worst case scenario. What's the average and best case?
As long as there are non-russian alternatives out there I'm never going to even try.
> campaigns for a Russian product on HN are annoying, and appaling if you have any morals
How is Yandex more morally-bankrupt than Google in your analysis?
https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large...
The quintessential HN comment questioning the obvious.
Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't.
Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away.
> Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't
Does media manipulation score higher/lower on your moral index than the widespread domestic spying the US has forced tech companies to be complicit in?
Not that media manipulation by the US government is exactly an unheard of event (at least as far back as the whole WMDs in Iraq scandal).
> Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away
Look, I'm American myself, and have as keen a dislike of Russia's foreign and domestic policies as the next guy. But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference, in a manner that may be detrimental to their customers.
> But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference
It is very different degree of subjection where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff, and country, where if you dare even to complain about some wild highly illegal stuff that the kgb demands corporation that you working for to do, you end up getting 30 years in prison for treason, falling out of the window, getting poisoned by some chemical weapon, and even then you will be considering yourself a lucky man because nothing very, very bad had happened to your family.
> where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff
Post patriot act, we have none of those things in instances where the government invokes national security (for example, a national security letter can compel release of data without a court order, and comes with a pretty serious gag order)
I'm not American. You can say that Murica is up to no good, but RuZZia is definitely up to much much worse. It's way more oppressive and repressive by an order of magnitude. Employees at Yandex have to censor stuff about Putin and the war (see egorfine's screenshot) or they risk getting defenestrated, death by polonium, or death by torture. There is no "First Amendment". Putin's wishes are the law. He is trying very hard to destroy liberal democracies in Europe and around the world.
Of course Google is morally much better than Yandex. What sane mind would even question this? The fact that I'm getting downvoted just shows how out of touch this bubble is with real life.
Guidelines: Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing.
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> There are "politics and ideology" and there is right and wrong.
That is exactly how six-year-olds think.
Thankfully I'm not a 6 year old, and you're not my dad.
If anything, yours is the kind of retort a 12 year old would find clever.
I'd only use it via tor or private mode behind a CGNAT or VPN
There's no doubt about that but it definitely meets some people's needs.
IMO only useful for piracy.
I prefer Google itself but this goto update is terrible.
Do you use any Israeli products? What do you say about them?
I mean, if I were to accuse any search engine of an astroturfing campaign on HN, I'd certainly not pick Yandex over Kagi.