I've never used their normal search engine, but their image search blows Google out of the water.

I highly encourage anyone who frequently uses Google images to try out Yandex.

What's really interesting is the differences in the results -- it seems like Yandex is actually filtering for high quality art. I've got a project on the back burner to scrape google and Yandex for the same queries and then do different sorts of analysis on them and see if anything interesting pops up.

Going by eye, most photo results on Yandex are higher resolution, and more saturated. It also doesn't pull images from video thumbnails like Google does.

My favorite part about Yandex is that there's no DMCA. The amount of DMCA notices against search engines like Google and Bing is absolutely astonishing. Thousands of them are filed every day and a massive amount of webpages are delisted because of these complaints. You can look up some of them in the LumenDatabase [1].

[1] https://www.lumendatabase.org/

Yandex might be good in Russian (I don't know) but it's barely mediocre in English and really bad at other less common languages.

The only good thing about it was that it used to give unfiltered results for some queries that google had shadowbanned (such as for piratebay or scihub). However as far as I can tell thats no longer always the case.

For adult searches and IP protected work sourcing, it's also a decent medium.

Yeah, I meant it's good for porn and pirating.