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Should I stop using Kagi because they do business with Yandex?
So perhaps I should have done more research , should have known, etc. But their recent news post took me by surprise:
Your subscription money at work:
Image search enhanced with Yandex
They're just out there bragging about giving money to Yandex. This bothers me.
As I said above, I should perhaps done more to research this before subbing, but that news post.
Shame, as I quite liked the search, but it's back to DDG I guess.
Am I over reacting here? What do others think?
This is their response on Discord
As an American company I’m kind of surprised Kagi is able to do business with Yandex. Though with the new administration I have doubts about how long Russian sanctions will last.
Yeah, well I do.
If Trump does terrible geopolitical things during his time as president, would you extend this discrimination to American companies?
People already do discriminate against American companies for their political entanglements: see Hobby Lobby, Chick-fil-A, Twitter/X, My Pillow, etc. If an American business started peddling propaganda a la Yandex, then yes, you can absolutely some to boycott.
It's also worth bearing in mind that a Kagi subscription is firmly a discretionary expense, so consumers can afford to demand higher standards. It would be unfair to expect people to boycott the Dollar General, for example, if they're living in a food desert.
The difference is that those American companies are promoting what they're promoting due to personal beliefs of their owners, whereas Yandex is promoting Russian propaganda because it operates under the Russian government so it has no other choice
Sure but everyone has their line, and that line is generally set by a complex weighing of the company itself, the politics around it nationally and locally, the personal beliefs of that individual, the level of inconvenience to their lives, and the awareness of and the amount of importance placed on each.
I don't shop at Hobby Lobby due to their bullshit at banning coverage of birth control just to sue over the ACA and then generally being very Christian and like, stealing artifacts IIRC. I also have multiple other local craft store options and need craft supplies less often than I used to.
There are people with the same general values as me that do shop at Hobby Lobby, because their other option is basically Amazon, and that's worse for them. Or because in the manager at their local Michael's failed to fire the homophobic employee that called a friend a slur. Or because the issues that bother me about HL have never registered to them because they're younger than me. They may also feel that their business doesnt matter in the scheme of things and they express their values in different ways. It's all weights on a scale but none of our personal little weights to each are identical.
It would be difficult for an American living in America to boycott all American companies. But they might try I suppose (probably for a YouTube video). Someone elsewhere may feel that Russia's existing fake elections and war for territory are still currently worse than the US's fragile elections and war for all the other reasons we do war things. Or it may be that they can easily avoid Russian products, but less so American ones.
It's not all or nothing for most people. And probably never will be.
I think this is a far reaching false equivalence. Despite the change in title I think the core question is “Is Kagi’s relationship with Yandex serious enough that it would be immoral for me to give Kagi money?” I think that’s a reasonable ask, though the answer is subjective, we can highlight some facts surrounding Kagi and Yandex that may help others reach a conclusion in accordance with their own moral compass.
I don’t think it’s hypocritical or virtue signaling to make conscientious decisions with your money when you can. Morality isn’t a zero sum game. I don’t think that was the point you were trying to make, but I also don’t think you were actually curious if Bret would boycott American companies. Please correct me if I’m wrong, this is just the vibe I got from your comment.
?
I thought the point was pretty clear, but to state it plainly:
If it is wrong to purchase from a company who does business with a company in a country that does Bad Geopolitical Things™, then it seems like it is wrong not only to purchase from American companies, but to purchase from any company that does business with an American company, should America do the Bad Geopolitical Things™.
There’s two oversimplifications there. One is that the nuance in what “bad geopolitical things” is lost. There are degrees to things.
Second, is that it makes it all or nothing for no reason. Sure, maybe America in this hypothetical also does bad things. But that doesn’t change the fact that not supporting Russian companies is aligned with your ethical standpoint, and something is better than nothing.
*sigh* so since I didn't spell it out, let's make it Roughly As Bad Geopolitical Things™
I think most people intuitively care about moral consistency.
It’s not a question of moral consistency, but of actions. Actions have costs and some are more practical than others.
As an example, if someone were trying to lose weight, and they are a donut and had a Starbucks frap every morning, if they said they were cutting the frap but not the donut, would you tell them, “you’re not being consistent! Why cut the drink but not the donut! You shouldn’t do either if you can’t be consistent!” - that would seem silly, calories are calories, in the end.
You can believe that supporting both countries are bad in this situation, so no moral inconsistency, but that anything is better than nothing, and that not paying Russian services is much easier than not giving any money to US companies, especially if you live in the US.
Yes, in a logical vacuum, your assertion is true. However my point is morality is more nuanced than a logical if-then assertion.
I’m not trying to be rude, I just disagree with the (now confirmed) sentiment that someone should engage consistently across their moral boycotts.
I encourage anyone from another country to boycott American companies if they feel the USA is doing Bad Geopolitical Things (we are). As an American, I don't have a whole lot of latitude there. I cannot simply opt out of paying taxes, and for the most part my choice is limited to deciding which American company I want to patronize (if there's a choice at all).
For what it's worth, the CEO of Kagi said in Discord that you can expect ~2% of your subscription cost to go to Yandex.
EDIT: He wrote the same on the Feedback post: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19
It kind of depends on the extent of the involvement of those companies. One of the defining characteristics of Russia right now is the heavy amount of corruption involved in doing any business there. And yes, if Trump did something as bad as trying to invade, rape, and pillage another country, I would extend my discrimination to any American company not taking a stand against that.
US military already invade and rape in other countries. In mine there were several soldiers that raped 11 years old girls…
Not to discredit your point, the sexual assault of young girls is definitely not something to support, however I believe @bret is using the more historical meaning of the word “rape”, of which the modern word derives from, meaning “to take away by force”. They are unlikely to be saying that Russia are sexual assaulting people (although I do believe there were instances where that occurred), but merely that they have taken away land and resources from Ukraine
Going to be honest with you, I know that some “Americans” see themselves as the “good guys”, at the beginning I was thinking that the initial post kinda had a point and I understand that line of thinking, but I started to think about the things that US did not only in my country but in others and I just see this as highly hypocritical. US has basically have been supporting a genocide for years, for starters…
Yeah, it's just something to stroke their own egos. Doing this sitting at home feels like they are doing something, but they are doing nothing at all.
Stopping to support a small company that's trying to be an alternative to google is not the way to go about this
IMO I wouldn’t, it’s a bit putting the cart before the horse when I’m paying income taxes to said Trump government to begin with.
Kind of a lame response. There's a huge difference between choosing not to do business with a country and actively censoring content from a country. I don't want them to remove yandex.com from their search results. I don't even want them to remove the !yandex, etc, bangs. I just don't want money that I'm paying to Kagi to fund the Russian war machine in exchange for access to their index.
I agree here, but the response makes sense because Yandex image search is unique and gives results that other image search engines don't. If Kagi only cares about the quality of its results, then that unfortunately logically leads to using it, and although I am a huge russophobe, I have some respect for that approach. Contrary to many european companies they're at least doing it openly and with a stated reason that makes sense.
Genuine question: is that uniqueness potentially why there might be a higher risk of the Russian government having access to/using those pictures for nefarious purposes?
No idea. I think they simply have better algorithms for this particular task, partly probably because they have to do less censorship (regarding crawling private data etc.) or data sanitization than western companies bound by stronger regulation, but this is speculation.
I'd not actually call those reasons - less privacy, not having regulation - wins personally.
But I just wonder if that same algorithm basically opens data up to the government. And to be fair that's true everywhere, but I can at least pick which governments get my info. (I don't use Kagi, so this is just academic for me)
I'm not claiming that either. Though, if it weren't Russia specifically, I wouldn't be sure that it has to be a negative. Not all regulations are sensible. I don't use Kagi either, so I'm reserving my judgment. But aside from uploading private images to their similarity search (that I wouldn't do), I don't think the data they get from image search specifically is very valuable.
Probably depends how popular they are in Russia or how popular Kagi is for the sort of people who also upload military documents on discord to prove which tanks aren't being correctly started out in a video game.
Or, maybe, mostly, Russia doesn't care about it. Idk.
Unrelated, but I so so hate company stop using forum or at least reddit as their Q&A platform. Discord can't be indexed and their built-in search can be finicky at the best of time
Also unrelated to the post topic, but I agree with Discord being so far removed from the best platform for this; in Kagi’s case, for actual feedback, bug reports, etc., they’ve built their own fully independent platforms which are really well made and easy to use. And, crucially, browsing doesn’t need an account and search is actually useful.
Furthermore, the “official” news always gets posted to their own website as well, so while you’re definitely not getting to know everything, at least their “Q&A (edit: and bug report) ecosystem” is usable fairly well.
But in general… yeah, most small- to medium-sized companies and a lot of OSS projects unfortunately don’t bother when supposedly free hosting & infrastructure is right there. Either it’s Discord or straight up no public “forum” functionality at all.
Ultimately they don’t bother because self hosted forums just don’t get many users. The general public isn’t really into making a new account just for your forum anymore.
There's https://www.answeroverflow.com/ which was built for exactly that
Their response sucks, and it was already the same lame non-answer when they announced a partnership with Brave.
You can't claim to be "neutral" - whatever that could mean - on (geo)political issues, while being THE paid search engine. As a user, if you choose to pay for a search engine, you're taking a stance that is definitely not neutral. Tech is not neutral.
And it sucks because I want to see a viable internet business model that does not rely on big data and advertising, but it looks like it's only always going to be assholes all the way down, just of a different kind.
The current status of that partnership seems unclear as the docs have removed the names of their third-party organic-link sources.
I would have to stop using the internet if I go this way about the USA since it finances Iraq and every other war and coup that happens on the planet
Only you can say if you're overreacting. I know I stopped short of actually trying them on account of them being Russian, but plenty of people continue to use the service for a variety of reasons.
Do you consider them being Russian important enough to stop using their service? Then no, you are not overreacting, you are considering your principles.
Do you consider them being Russian is not important on a geopolitical scale? Then you can continue using their services.
Edit to add: So I did some extra reading up on Yandex and they're all in all your bog standard scummy corpa except Russian instead of from the US.
They got caught harvesting Ukrainian user data back in 2017.
They promote Russian propaganda websites as top results.
But also denied the FSB their encryption keys.
It looks to me that they're toeing the line of what's acceptable to function in Russia and what's acceptable as a scummy business.
Nothing shows that they're actually fully on board with what the Kremlin is doing, but there's also nothing that fully exonerates them from it either.
Considering their size, they are far more than a search engine, you can somewhat assume they are in the pocket of the Kremlin or at the very least have to comply with their wishes.
So, overreacting? If you do not want to (indirectly) support the Russian war effort I don't think you want to support Yandex.
That may to some extent have been the case once upon a time, but earlier this year, the company that used to be Yandex was forced to sell their search engine business to a Russian investment fund that, to the best of my understanding, is operated by people close to Kremlin. So I think it's safe to assume that the current Yandex is very much on board with Putin's world view.
Here is an article that looks at this and Yandex's history with Kremlin more widely.
I thought that was the Dutch holding that sold their part of the business. You may be right though.
There's no doubt in my mind however whether or not they're complicit. A business this size operating in Russia does not get away with noncompliance.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that Yandex was owned by Yandex N.V., a Dutch holding company. Earlier this year, it sold its ownership of Yandex to that Russian investment fund, and changed its name to Nebius Group N.V., continuing to work in AI and self-driving technologies. Arkady Volozh, who founded Yandex, continues as the CEO of Nebius. I haven't followed his career closely, but from what I have gathered, he doesn't seem to have been that keen on the direction that Russia has been taking in recent decades.
But I must stress that I really know next to nothing about this, other than what has been reported in the press over the years.
That Dutch holding owned just about 20 to 25% of the entire conglomerate, so while that's a large share, it wasn't most of it. They sold (late and at a discount) because of sanctions.
I'm also no expert, so thanks for the insights!
And thank you for the clarification as well! That definitely puts things into context.
In a vacuum, this would be bad, but ultimately Kagi is trying to compete with Google and they need all the sources they can get. If they're too picky, then Kagi fails to be a good search engine, goes bankrupt, and everyone is stuck with Google et al. It's a balancing act, although some people boycotting Kagi over this wouldn't be bad.
At the end of the day, Kagi is a US business and I doubt they're doing any illegal sanction-busting. And I have more confidence in Kagi's moral compass than I do in Google's moral compass.
And I mean, if the binary choice is between Kagi whom as far as I can tells worst sin was getting some Yandex dough and Google. I mean... I think it would be a pretty obvious choice.
I could list all of the insanely sketchy/unethical stuff Google has done but we'd be here for a minute. I mean Project Nimbus is one that comes to mind. But so far Google has a much worse track record compared to Kagi.
I guess it depends, but honestly I wouldn't let perfection get in the way of just trying to be better.
Also please consider stop using products from companies that support the current genocide occuring in Gaza, e.g Coca Cola and Pepsi
The list would include most American companies.
Yup. I can tell you many, many major tech companies have offices in Israel. Off the top of my head, that includes Intel, IBM, and Google (Waze in particular was developed by an Israeli startup).
I believe having an office in Israel does not mean they’re supporting the current government. However, most companies punished employees when they stood in solidarity with Palestine, Google being the most prominent example.
I mean, neither does solely selling your product in Israel. It's the same to me for supporting conscripts while they do legally mandated service, which from what I understand, is all the Coca Cola and McDonald's ever did 🤷♀️
I agree. Adidas dropping Bella Hadid is another example.
Might help if you give some context on why Yandex is a problem.
Edit:
From some quick searching I'm assuming it is because they are a Russian company?
Yeah. I'm not American -- for whom I do believe trading with Yandex is actually forbidden (could be wrong)
We do actually work with Ukranian refugees though, so this is not something I want to support. I'm more annoyed with myself as much as anything for not looking into this properly sooner.
I mean...you could also use email aliases to keep creating new temporary Kagi accounts and use their service for "free", thus costing them money.
I emailed Kagi’s CEO with a few questions, these may or may not influence your decision:
Some quick maths: 34k users at $5/month for a standard user yields approximately $3.4k/month or $204k total to Yandex since Kagi started (possibly less, I assume adding Yandex Images as a source increased allocation to 2%).
Personally, I won’t stop using Kagi over its business relationship with Yandex. I don’t think $204k is much money in the eyes of Yandex, and I don’t think the Kremlin is gets a significant amount, if any, of its funds from Yandex. You can certainly stop using Kagi all together if that relationship makes you uncomfortable, but I don’t think that would impact the Russia-Ukraine war in any way.
Thank you for the numbers.
A late addition:
It is very likely even less still since they’ve most definitely not had 30k users from day 1, in addition to what you said about the percentage spending that goes to Yandex probably having been way lower in the past. And the sub-million $ guesstimate was already pretty much insignificant to funding any form of warfare…
The title of the post lead me to believe you were abandoning Kagi because you found the service of Yandex to be superior. Yandex' reverse image search works very well, I use it often to trace the origins of images. Overall searching on Yandex gives me way better results than other mainstream non-paid search engines.
As a left leaning non-US citizen watching the developments in the US it appears to me any major differences between the Russian and US political system are shrinking, corporate wellfare and the corporate capture of the political system.
Comment posters are leading me to believe I didn't construct a good titles. Nothing I can do about that now, sadly.
I always used tineye to reverse search images I think that was the first one I ever heard of.
I updated the title. If you would like it updated again, let me know
Hey perfect, thanks!
You can ask Mycketforvirrad to change your title.
Thanks for posting this. I just sent an email to support@kagi.com to ask WTF and express that I'll have to cancel my Ultimate subscription if this goes unaddressed.
It doesn't strike me as an overreaction. It feels like a principled response. If everyone did this, the world would be a better place.
I don't think you are necessarily over reacting here. As far as doing your research, I recently came across this blog post: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Not everyone agrees with the points brought up in the blog post. For example, I mentioned it previously and everyone clearly has their own views on it. So I am not here to argue for or against you using Kagi based on the blog post. But, again, I think it is reasonable to include in the context of you mentioning doing research.
Certainly because it fits with them using Yandex as the CEO very much seems the person to argue that "technology is technology and not political". Which is reflected in some of their choices.
I thought of using Kagi, but stuff like this is frustrating. It makes sense that you can't control everything a company chooses to do.
While trying out Google alternatives I stumbled upon searXNG. I've been using a public instance (https://searx.be/ mostly) and I'm happy with it so far. It's easy to use and if you add a few search engines like Google, Bing, and Duckduckgo, it gives solid results. I may create my own private instance at some point. Seems easy enough to set up.
I might be foolish or misunderstanding, but if you use Google to supply results for another search engine ... isn't that just using Google with extra steps?
I guess the usefulness depends on what you're trying to achieve. Searxng is a step in between that anonymizes the search with Google and that's what I want. It also gives you anonymized results from more than one search engine and those are pretty good if you decide to combine Bing and Duckduckgo for example.
I'm still figuring it out and testing options. The customization is also pretty cool actually, searching for files is really easy for example.
Kagi is not a independent search engine.
Most companies still use X, and pay for premium there. Musk got Trump elected.
Although I don’t agree with Russia on many issues, I believe it’s a slippery slope to start boycotting companies based on where their headquarters are. Does Yandex itself have scandals? I’m more interested in that.
Also haven't heard of Yandex. Can you clue me in?
Russian search engine.
Ah, I see. Thanks for letting me know.
And no, don't be annoyed with yourself, you didn't do anything wrong, their government did. Stay strong, live well and be kind to yourself: if we're gonna outlive these regimes we need to take good care of ourselves.
their image search is one of the best for hard to find source-images.
Kagi has always used Yandex as one of their search result sources IIRC.
As I said, lack of research on my part I suppose. It was thrown in to sharp focus when a news post of theirs, the first destination they bragged about giving subscriber money to was Yandex. Focusses the mind somewhat.
Do what makes you happy, I suppose. I think everyone has a schema in mind for what kind of behavior they would concience and what they wouldn't. For me, "Does business with a bad search engine" isn't a sufficient criteria for sanction, but that's just me, and I make no claims of being a paragon of virtue whose example should be followed. If that's beyond the pale for you, if it bothers you, then you might consider ending your support of Kagi. Do what makes you happy.
I feel like this is why most companies caters for advertisers and not users - one misstep can easily cause users to leave and reacquiring one is hard and you get a fixed amount of money.
Acquiring a few large advertiser may be all that a company needs and you'd only need to make a handful of advertisers happy.
I do think you're underestimating how easily advertisers are put off by certain content. If anything, advertisers can be far MORE skittish about where they're advertising (though they tend to be skittish about different things than many users). The difference is that services that rely on advertising much more frequently acquiesce to the desires of advertisers than they do to users. YouTube's draconic demonetization rules are a very good example of this.
I believe the users should be broken into two buckets: the general user and the ethical alternate user. Ethical alternative enjoyers are much quicker to drop a service for seemingly minor reasons than advertisers. The advertisers’ content preferences are known in advance and mostly change if a newspaper gets a bee in its bonnet and writes a hit piece (like the NYT’s expose of PewDiePie killing the Let’s Play genre of YouTube). The general public has no standards, typically. Whether the anarchist alternative resembles /b/ era 4chan or /pol/ era largely depends on how dissatisfied people are with the advertiser sandbox. The less angry at the ad-censored internet, the less shitposty and more hate pervades the alternate spaces.
If /b/ is the opposite end of the spectrum from /pol/, I don't think anywhere on the spectrum is somewhere I want to spend my time.
The /b/ he's referring to and the /b/ you're thinking of may be two different beasts. I remember it being quite different prior to 2012 and especially 2016.
Of course, wading through "The Ocean of Piss" has always been an acquired taste, no matter how valuable the seashells may be, so it's fair to still not want to partake.
Good example here. It still sucked, and it was still pretty ignorantly and ironically slinging hate towards minority groups, and it was still a bunch of 13 y/o edgelords trying to cosplay being 18... But it was all a less bone-deep resentment kinda insidious that /pol/ brought? IMO?
I definitely won't dispute that it's gotten way worse over time than it was, but I still think the starting point was pretty bad.
I recently tested out their Orion browser and before long I was browsing their feedback forum. I had heard about the guy running it being an asshole before, but boy were the forums eye-opening. If you can't engage with your community in good faith I'm not sure how the community can be successful. Despite not being very big, it seems like these events keep happening that rub people the wrong way.