This community's favorite thing is to complain about something that's ill defined. A post about BGP without saying it's the border gateway protocol will have its comments go off on a stupid tangent of if an HN reader should be expected to know what BGP is. (seriously people, go Google the term and don't demand everyone spoon-feed your intellectual midgetry!) Thus, an explanation that Yandex is Russian Google is to try and head off that derail. Of course, now we're having this discussion instead, so it seems like we can't win.

Even if I've heard the name Yandex before, it's a good reminder of what it is.

It’s the same as saying Naver (SK Google), or Weibo (Chinese Twitter), and so on. They’re primarily used by their local residents, and have little traction outside, despite having millions of active users. Giving a clarification makes it a bit more clear.

The Yandex brand is only directly used in the Russian market, I think? The company does also have popular products abroad like the discount taxi app Yango, but you need to connect the dots there. (I suppose they intentionally try to brand these products away from Yandex to reduce the impact of the Russian connection.)

Regional sites and apps in general aren’t that well known. How many people on HN are familiar with Kaspi, the “WeChat of Kazakhstan”? Apparently it’s immensely popular there and completely unknown elsewhere. Like Kazakhstan, Russia isn’t a significant market globally.

You're over-estimating how many people actually "surf" the net. I'd wager most of HN knows Yandex, but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex (aside from streaming, even then they probably aren't explicitly going to the yandex url). You would see the same case for a Chinese search engine.

People in general spend a remarkable amount of time visiting the same 3-4 websites over and over and some apps.

I don't think it's inappropriate to provide context to people that might not be across Yandex. HN is read by a large volume of people from diverse backgrounds -- not always CS and/or startups.

I would not be surprised if some subset of those people hadn't heard of Yandex.

I know it but only because they didn't require phone confirmation for email accounts so it was great for sockpuppets.

I've asked around here to my colleagues and none of them have ever heard of it. One of them asked if it's the same as baidu :)

To me, the name Yandex seemed familiar, but I did not know what it was until now.

I know what it is, but IIRC haven't used it, even a single time.

But I don't think most people around here (Central Europe) heard about it. It's kinda like Baidu in that regard.

Their software counterpart seems nice. I have only had experienced with Yandex browser though, at the time I liked to try out different browser to find what work best.

Yandex was minimal looking on both mobile and desktop and had nice features such as its equivalent of Opera Turbo, automatically use of a separate container for banking apps etc. They also have a Russian dubbing feature for Youtube but I don't know how well it work or any risk of censoring, not speaking the language.

I think you're asking the wrong question, at least for me.

If "Yandex" is selling all Russia-based businesses/assets and is itself "Russian Google" - what's left then.

For me this means I now kinda have to dig deeper and grasp wtf is actually going on, because to me Yandex was exactly that, a Russian search engine and nothing more (although I saw some people hint at more in the past, never looked it up).

I have heard the name before, but only in topics regarding russia, e.g. news about the Moscow stock market or similar. I couldn't tell you what sort of products they have. I have never used one of their sites/products (at least knowingly). I always assumed it was a Russian tech company having 100% Russian users. Basically like vk(ontakte) is, or what Baidu is in China?

I’m more curious what you’re going to do to anyone who reports to you for the crime of not knowing what Yandex is

I've heard of Yandex but never used it.

Actually I have a question: what are they salvaging this way, considering the comments say all their operations and people are physically in Russia?

I didn't hear about yandex until last year, and it was probably from this website, and only as an option for duckduckgo to use use for image search.

Despite HN guidelines "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" people are generally not curious about what is going on outside their country (+US).