Comment by pavlov
2 years ago
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.
"Yandex" is used everywhere AFAIK. I (in NZ) have used their search-by-image, which sometimes finds things no other image search seems to be able to.
But also can find by image likeness which allows you to find where an image is coming from. Google images used to do that but now they merely analyse the image and search for what they think is the textual description of the image.
Exactly. Tineye is my go-to for searching by image, Yandex and Bing are backups, and Google can often still be convinced to by using "search by image" extensions or the "Find image source" button in Google Lens, but it's more friction so I don't usually bother any more.
I use Yandex on a weekly basis because its reverse image search is much better Google and Bing.