Tell HN: Don't Be Afraid of Yandex | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Don't Be Afraid of Yandex

There have been two threads in the last days about alternative search engines. I've noticed that whenever someone mentions Yandex, there is some skepticism and some users are "afraid" of using it due to being hosted in Russia.

Well let me tell you, there are some benefits to this: mainly it has a more permissive content policy compared to Google in some cases.

It's important to note that Yandex still complies with local laws and regulations, they are just different there.

I've used to resort to DDG when Google just wont (want to) display what I was looking for. It seems it has been neutered too. Yandex has not.

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People are logically afraid that the way information is filtered by Yandex, their view of the world may become distorted and infected with Russian narrative. Let's say, try looking for anything about LGBT or the Orthodox church with Yandex, you will see stuff that looks coherent and is solely designed to bend public opinion onto the Kremlin side.

Yandex is Russia - OWNED, not just hosted there. That is, at least after the recent takeover and emigration of original founders, it is directly a state-sponsored propaganda tool fully in the hands on Kremlin, existing for the political purpose, not to make money.

It is same as using VK.com for social network for the reason that it has loads of pirated software, movies and porn (which is by the way true). You will slowly become just a walking product, and later a tool of Russian propaganda.

For this reason, i completely quit any sources of information in the Russian language, try to not use services with probable Russian association, and cut off all Russian contacts except those i have chances to pull out of there (and already succeeded with a few) - however toxic the model of thinking of these people is, i feel it's worth the risk because i am doing my part of weakening Russia by doing it.

you give information without citing references, so you have to take your word for it, and what you say is practically false, Google also does the same thing. So it's up to you to choose your side. net neutrality has long since become obsolete

These are good points. To be honest, I cannot fully follow the line of argument as presented by anovikov.

It seems a tad strange to criticise Yandex for filtering content according to local law and recommending Google over it, when the latter does the very same thing. Speaking of "narratives", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEvD1Wu9uQo

The phrase "net neutrality" generally has a different meaning than you give it. You should rephrase so that people understand what you're writing means.

Nobody is immune to propaganda, some are just more susceptible than others. But if you're not capable of personal agency you shouldn't be online anyway.

Knowing a source's bias is a good thing.

Being extremely distrustful of a source's news when you're aware that there's a conflict with their bias is a mark of wisdom.

But proudly remaining in a state of willful ignorance and refusing to even try and understand the other side leads to hell on Earth and is not a good thing.

Yandex's image search is probably the best online. Yandex's image translate is awesome too. Outside of that I don't use them for actual search.

Yandex's search by image functionality is also much better than Google's is. I feel like Google substantially neutered that as well.

Yandex has a number of operators which other search engines still don't offer. Sometimes they don't work quite as well as they should judging by the last time I was hunting something particular, but I guess it's progressing. Of course nothing of interest is on the computer I use to access the web, so a search engine is just that since I'm not searching for subjects or topics Putin's crowd might take objection to.

I fully agree with you

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