Comment by axegon_

12 hours ago

I'd be more than willing to subscribe and support the project BUT, I need to address the elephant in the room: The reason why I'm against Kagi is the fact that they use Yandex(be it only for images according to their own words) and I'm sure as hell refusing to give a single cent to them. So I guess my question is: sources?

61 comments

axegon_

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specproc  12 hours ago

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.

  • NicuCalcea  11 hours ago

    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.

    • graemep  10 hours ago

      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.

      4 replies →

  • _diyar  12 hours ago

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

    • __jonas  15 minutes ago

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

    • carlosjobim  9 hours ago

      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.

psychoslave  12 hours ago

What's wrong with Yandex? Is it quality of service being too low? Does the company have tracking records of shady practices, worst than what GAFAM are doing that make customer flee away?

  • SyneRyder  11 hours ago

    In my experience, Yandex was feeding in a lot of low quality results into Kagi - lots of pirated software, shady websites, proxy duplicate copycat sites, content that I'll euphemistically call "free speech". Kagi has a domain blacklist feature, but I was starting to fill up my blocklist - I think it's capped at 1000 domains, and many of these sites spin up new domains specifically to get around blocklists.

    There's also the geopolitical issues, which I'll skip over because similar concerns can be leveled at other indexes too. I posted about that on the Kagi feedback forums back in 2024:

    https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...

    I since built my own metasearch engine for my own use, where I choose the external indexes used, and I'm much happier. I started building a personal index of the web as well. I haven't used Kagi or Google for over a year now.

    I hope I'm not distracting from Bruno's Uruky project here. Not everyone is technical enough to spin up some PHP code and make their own metasearch, or spin up a VPS and install a SearxNG instance. There's value in providing a good user experience for less technical users, in building resilience by using multiple indexes & building your own, and reducing dependencies on external index APIs that may cut off your access (coffgooglebingcoff). I'm glad services like Uruky exist.

    • gunalx  2 hours ago

      Main feature of urky seems to really be privacy. on my own searxNG i would be all the traffic. If I ho through urky hopefully I can hide with traffic from other users.

sevg  12 hours ago

But is Yandex government owned? What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families, and a percentage of that ends up going via taxes to Putin? Are we boycotting all Russians everywhere globally?

  • distances  9 hours ago

    All businesses based in Russia should be boycotted, also second-hand (so businesses that deal with other businesses based in Russia).

    If I knew someone was sending money to Russia, I would of course avoid any contact (let alone financial ties) with them.

  • Ray20  8 hours ago

    > But is Yandex government owned?

    In fact, yes. Yandex is totally controlled by Putin's presidential administration.

    > What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families

    It doesn't seem like a significant factor. The main flow of money into Russia are payments for fossil fuel and trade balance with China.