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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a comment a few years back how I was using Yandex quite a bit at the time because there are things I'm simply unable to find on Google – sites like sci-hub for example.

Today though I find myself using it daily. The results are far from perfect, but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results like many of the popular Western alternatives.

I don't use image search much, but yes I completely agree with you there. Google image search is completely unusable to me at this point, so I always default to Bing and Yandex for that (still need to try Brave). And Yandex imo is the only search engine with a functional reverse image search anymore.

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> sites like sci-hub for example

To be fair, that is not Google's fault.

It always cracks me up that when you see the DMCA note on the bottom and you click on it, you get to see the hosts anyways:

https://lumendatabase.org/notices/26024315

That is how I search for pirated content.

Yes the Russians don't really produce a lot of software or entertainment that Westerners want. So they have no stake in enforcement of copyright.

>Senders: [...] Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH

Why am I not surprised to see Springer as one of the claimants? /rhetorical question

>but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results

the word 'random' must be doing a lot of work in that sentence given that they are subject to Roskomnadzor's regulations and are thus forced not just arbitrarily but systematically censor content: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/01/a-window-into-yandex...

But us westerners usually don't care much about that kind of censorship because it doesn't affect the searches we normally do. ("normally" as in "we usually don't search stuff about russian politics")

How about if you do searches about history? In Russia, it is explicitly a crime to portray the "Great patriotic War" as anything but noble, wonderful, and a huge russian success story. Multiple game developers have active warrants for arrest in russia because they put a russian tank in their game that isn't OP, or have a campaign that accurately demonstrates an unsavory thing the soviets did in the 40s.

While I was still living in Russia, llvm.org was blocked for several years because fuck you we balling.

It looks like the best solution is for “westerners” to use Yandex and everyone else to use Google or Bing and this way they can search with less targeted censoring on their terms.

Are people in Russia allowed to use Google? I thought Russia has been locking down their Internet for a while. Not as bad as China, but still missing anything unflattering to Putie.

Google properties are still unblocked, for now. But, yes, Internet censorship in Russia went into overdrive with the invasion.

Why don't you just click on Google Image Search's Pinterest links?

www.tineye.com is also a pretty good image searcher.

It's better than what Google offers now, but still worse than Yandex.

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