17
votes
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.
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.
Yeah, well I do.
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
There's https://www.answeroverflow.com/ which was built for exactly that
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.
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.
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.
You can ask Mycketforvirrad to change your title.
I updated the title. If you would like it updated again, let me know
Hey perfect, thanks!
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.
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.
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.
Also please consider stop using products from companies that support the current genocide occuring in Gaza, e.g Coca Cola and Pepsi
Kagi has always used Yandex as one of their search result sources IIRC.
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.