can you perhaps elaborate on which companies and in what capacity?
Vlad's stance is very refreshing in the current politically correct world: if including an index makes for better search results (= a better product for the users), it will be included.
I’m not saying it’s good to favour invasive countries, I’m just saying this is hypocritical. I have no particular love for either the US or Russia.
Besides, if you spent some time on the kagifeedback forums you'd know that there is a particular brand of weird user there that wants to force Kagi to exclude or rejigger certain search results to be (effectively) more woke, which falls pretty much under the same umbrella as excluding whole indexes.
With Kagi you get the results as-is, and you get to personally ignore, downrank or block any of them you don't like. Much better than having a minority of users force all of us into their bubble.