'Russia's Google' exits the country | Hacker News Reader

'Russia's Google' exits the country

tomshardware.com

44 pointsbelter24 comments

I think the reporting is a bit confusing here.

Yandex was a dutch publicly traded company. Yandex name and search engine has been sold to Russian investors and will move to Russia.

The Dutch company will remain and will focus on AI instead and rename to Nebius group.

So Yandex the (the search engine) enters the country. Not exits.

It's very important to twist the news like some terrible things are happening in Russia, when it's quite the opposite.

Is this a modern day nationalization? Essentially forced to sell at a 50% discount.

In many ways very similar to what is happening to TikTok with the US. Although, now I think of it, it is just assumed that TikTok will end up under American control? I wonder what would happen if some group like the Saudi Royal Family bought it and moved the global HQ to Dubai?

Why would Saudis want to support another country and not their own? Dubai is in the UAE

Because I learned geography on TikTok?

"Is this a modern day nationalization? Essentially forced to sell at a 50% discount."

This is "modern day nationalization": "In March 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the G7 countries froze around €260 billion ($280 billion) of the Central Bank of Russia’s reserves held in Western currencies and securities, including €210 billion deposited in Europe, mostly with Belgium’s Euroclear (around €159 billion). The remaining funds are deposited in France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan (although specific values have not been given), the US (around €4.5 billion) and other countries." [0]

[0] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2024-05-24/eus...

It looks like the search engine and search index remains in Russia? That's an interesting choice.

Regardless of how you feel about Russia, having a search index that's not US-controlled (or EU-controlled, not that there are any of those of any real size) is very useful. Yandex has the third(?) largest index of the web proper, and is a great check on the two largest indexes.

The Yandex translate is excellent - especially for the Georgian language vs Google and others.

And "Search by picture"

Yeah, Yandex is the only place to go if you want to avoid the overwhelming grip that the west has over every search engine and every vulnerable source of info. I just can't stand their damnable captchas.

Start off by searching for "yx" or "xy".

Then do your actual search.

If you're going for image search, do the yx/xy text search first, then you go over to images.

That'll (for some reason) never give you a captcha.

Say what you will against russia but their search index is unmatched for finding movie streamz, warez, porn and anything you desire. Google feels very crippled in this regard.

Actual article:

Yandex split finalised as Russian assets sold in $5.4 bln deal

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/yandex-nv-finalises-54...

The title should simply say "Yandex".

Yandex "was never in Russia" to begin with

http://blog.micromarketing.ru/advice/9-point-5-rules-fot-it-... (2010)

Owning the company through an non-russian layer was a common way of doing IT in '00s

After Russia started making "landing" laws this become not a viable option anymore

Yandex (West of the Urals) and Mojeek (UK) are pretty much Europe's independent search engines on any semblance of web scale.

What about that Czech language one, seznam.cz?

Never heard about it.

I believe they restrict themself to CZ content

They regularly check web servers that I set up. Seem to prefer IPv6 addresses.

I had a quick look and see they do index some non-CZ content.

That's great news for Yandex, I hope they are able to find success. Search needs competition.

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