Comment by RankingMember
4 hours ago
I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has decided to stop letting me see. (I tried DDG but for my use it's been worse than Google).
Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com
Yandex is big and has probably good engineers
I suspect it has more to do with incentives.
This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics.
There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts.
It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the approved Hammertech GripGlove that plays ads and is slippery.
Or you could use a random rock with a flat side, which is a much better hammer than that in every way. In the exact same fashion, Yandex blows Google out of the water. Not because they have smarter people running it or because the code is more elegant or because they have more money. They just don't have the means or motivation to actively screw with you to the same degree as Google, and that makes it better.
Anyone at this point could make a better search engine than google just by running a basic text search algorithm and not doing anything else, it just so happens that Yandex never bothered to go as far beyond that as the mainstream ones.
Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.
It's not "obscure." Yandex is Russia's Google.
Not crazy, I always resort to yandex when I know google is not showing me the results I am looking for
DDG doesn’t click for me sadly, and I cannot point my finger to where or why
DDG is repackaged Bing. Used to be Yandex too but sanctions put an end to that.
We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point, let alone the vastly different UXs.
7 replies →
Well, I'd love to know; as I've said in some other comments, we've changed and improved a lot in the last couple years and so feel free to send me feedback.
A bet the stupid name doesn’t help.
I know what you mean though, I use it but it’s never quite right. Hard to say exactly why.
My sister thought it was malware when she was seeing ads for it. Something about the whole overall branding is just bad.
3 replies →
Having a stupid name is tables stakes in the search space.
Someone round here said Yandex shows you what you searched for, while Google shows you what it thinks you should have searched for.