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Comment by specproc | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with Yandex? I think every possible criticism of Yandex I can think of could just as easily be leveled at Google or Bing.

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I also don't use Kagi because of Yandex, and my reason is that it's a Russian company, owned by people close to the Russian government.

I loathe both Russian and American governments, what's a boy to do?

That is a tough position, I don't have a definitive answer. Perhaps you could look at supporting non-US and non-Russian companies building their own search indexes? Not sure what the state of Ecosia and Qwant's European Search Perspective is these days, but that's an option.

Murder and jaywalking.

Kagi seems unfairly picked on here. Lots of people do business with Russia. Multiple EU countries import gas from Russia which, the UK just dropped sanctions on Russian oil, lots of countries do not have sanctions on Russia at all so buying things from those countries might involve money ending up going to Russia.

On the other hand Kagi is an American company so is at the very least abiding by US sanctions.

I'm not claiming it's an infallible system and that no single cent of my money goes to Russia. I just do what's within my powers based on the information I have.

You cannot have an infallible system, but my point is that Kagi keeps getting highlighted, but no-one else seems to.

In my circles, Europe's (continuing) dependency on Russian fossil fuels is discussed often and at length. This being a tech forum, it's to be expected that conversations would revolve around tech products like Kagi. Off the top of my head, Russian connections are also brought up in relation to OnlyOffice and Telegram.

But I agree, we should be more vigilant about who and what our money supports.

"I put ukraine flag in my social media profile"

Hell yeah, good for you.

It is maybe unconventional in a public discourse but I believe that it is completely fine for an individual human to "discriminate" anything multiple orders of magnitude more powerful, richer and more unaccountable to him/her than a human. For example - a billionaire, a corporation, a country, a block, an alliance, a military or mercenary unit and so on. Just because there are some other baddies around it is totally okay for an individual to boycott one of several selected baddies. Sure, it is a "discrimination" and it's fine. The power imbalance dictates that it is both ethical and logical thing to do.

It is especially logical to "discriminate" corporations which are not corrupt monopolies entwined with corrupt governments. Boycotting FAANG corpos is as pointless as it is impossible. The only reaction one may get from those is dead silence. Boycotting Kagi and publicly shaming them, may make them wake up and correct their misguided ways. For example, after years of nagging and shaming, DuckDuckGo has cut ties with Ruzzians. So that sometimes does work.

Is that better or worse than Google?

Why would anyone support US companies when they have been hoarding data for decades? things specially concerning at current state of the country.

I try to avoid US companies as well when possible, I just avoid Russian ones even more.

but surely you realize that people going to kagi also don’t like google or bing.

There's little future in catering to customers who come to you only because they hate Google. They will soon find a reason to hate you and fill up your support forums and Discord with complaints. After all, they are spending the gigantic amount of $10 per month on your service, and have a right to influence the company.

With Uruky, these customers can now move on instead, and the lower price will serve as another reason. And then they also don't have to worry anymore that their accountant is going to call at 3AM and demand that they "justify" the gigantic subscription cost.

And Kagi can focus on the only real selling point they have: Search results quality. Which is where their future lies and what most potential customers are looking to pay for. Not being anti-Google.

I think the point was that kagi uses google and bing as it’s search providers, besides others like yandex

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